One thousand pages, no database
Five sites, about a thousand pages, no CMS, no database, no build server beyond a script that runs on my laptop. That sounds like a boast. It is mostly a description of a constraint I chose and then had to live with. The five, by size The pages are not one site with five sections. They are five separate sites with different shapes: a reference with 416 pages in four languages (repair guides,…
The author describes a unique website consisting of five separate sites, totaling roughly 1,000 HTML documents. These sites are generated from static files with no content management system (CMS) or database involved. The author has to manually generate the sitemap, compare it with the rendered files, and ensure they match on every build to prevent silent errors.
The website has various shapes, such as a reference site with four languages, a drumming reference with two languages, and a pronunciation reference with three phoneme inventories. The author also explains the challenges of having two independent language choices and multiple publishing channels, resulting in duplicate content and the need for cross-linking.
Static site generation does not solve all problems, as it requires rebuilding all pages with each edit and lacks search indexing, per-user state, and easy A/B testing. The author ultimately prefers this unglamorous approach for reference sites with identical content across multiple occurrences.
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