About

Since 2010, static site generators have grown more popular for web publishing, at least among geeks. I started blogging in 2001 by using the web-based SSG called Greymatter, created by Noah Grey.

Most SSG's do not have web interfaces. GitHub Pages, which uses the Jekyll SSG, permits users to create and update pages through a web browser. Authors can use GitHub's limited web-based "editor" or text area box. It's good enough most of the time.

For a more enhanced editing experience with GitHub Pages, I can connect the prose.io editor to my GitHub account. prose.io is maintained by Development Seed.

These web-based writing environments for GitHub Pages exist separately from the SSG, which is a good thing. Most SSG users create and edit their content on their local computers, using their favoriate text editors, and then they use all kinds of means to get their content uploaded, copied, synced, moved to, backed up, etc. to the final web server destination. Some of the steps used are too complex, in my opinion. Most of these solutions do not provide a means to create and edit content through a web browser.

For years, I poo-pooed static site generators because of their complexity, geekiness, and because I found it simple to search content that was stored in SQL and NoSQL databases.

But in 2016, I became a fan of static site generators for personal web publishing because of the simplicity in backing up content and moving content to another hosting provider. Plain text files that can be viewed with the cat command appealed to me. And I liked the lack of moving parts, associated with an SSG. No database and caching servers required.

But I also like to have the ability to create and update content through a web browser.

In 2016, I created web-based SSG in Perl called Wren that I use to manage my personal website sawv.org. In 2018, I created a similar web-based SSG in Lua called Sora.

Both Wren and Sora are API based. The "client" code manages the interactions with the user's web browser. The client code runs on a server, however, and it uses REST to interact with the API code by sending and receiving JSON. The APIs are not quite CRUD, since I don't provide a delete option.

If I desire, I can peform all operations from the command line, using cURL or command prompt scripts by interacting with the API code directly. My JavaScript "editor" works directly with the API code. So could a desktop or mobile native app if one existed that supported my API code.

But since my Wren app supports the IndieWeb's Micropub spec on the server, then any Micropub client can be used to create and edit content. These Micropub clients could be web-based or native apps that run on mobile devices or desktop/laptop computers.

Sora, however, does not support Micropub.

Both Wren and Sora, however, could be used without a web browser. I can create the plain text markup content on a local machine or on the server and use a command prompt utility to create the HTML page. Wren and Sora contain these commands.

I created my first, interactive web app in the fall of 1996. I like to read (or retrieve), create, and update through the web browser, my favorite app.