Hey hey @ben
! Thanks for the question. There's been a lot of thoughts regarding JAMstack that I've considered for my projects.
Before it was JAM, I got hooked on Jekyll because static was so appealing for me. Wordpress' click a button and have a site up in minutes was so appealing a few years back with a lot of hosting providers but you ran into a lot of issues like updates, praying that plugins didn't break on upgrades, DB corruptions and so on. With Jekyll, you could fall back on HTML, CSS and JS and create "dynamic" static sites which let you focus on the building instead of the managing. This was important for me, for example for my site. Although my writings date 2013 on my site, I've been writing on the web for much longer. So where is the archive pre 2013? Gone because it got lost in a DB somewhere. Exhausted by always having to maintain a system instead of creating content, when I stumbled on Jekyll, I was sold.
Fast track to 2018 and there is a lot to be excited about with static and the JAMstack scene. I've written about some of my excitement back in 2016 for Forestry. But with the entry of companies like Forestry and Netlify, I find it easier, cheaper and faster to get up and running with a static site. Some thing like Forestry allows you to adopt Hugo or Jekyll as a CMS where multiple authors can be supported. Which I think was a huge roadblock for bigger entities to adopt static. Netlify provides hosting, CDN, SSL and build and deployment which is phenomenal. It integrates well with BitBucket and GitHub. They also have some killer features such as forms that you can collect submissions from with just normal markup. Or lambda functions from within Netlify.
Really you can get creative with the JAMstack as long as you know the benefits and the limitations. But with services coming about these days, I can see a lot of the limitations disappearing. One use case is e-commerce for static or commenting. Or in Spell It Out's case, a lot of the steps are still manual to me. Which I don't mind since I like to curate the quality of the content, but there is a limit. I think I could eventually get to a point of automation for a lot, if not all my problems, but just haven't had the brain power to do so.
But would love to see more examples of projects that are successfully using the JAMstack. As a creative, static sites and the JAMstack has really allowed me to hash out my ideas quickly instead of worrying about frameworks, databases and servers.
This is quintessential JAMstack. Thoughts on this as a trending approach for web development?
Hey hey @ben ! Thanks for the question. There's been a lot of thoughts regarding JAMstack that I've considered for my projects.
Before it was JAM, I got hooked on Jekyll because static was so appealing for me. Wordpress' click a button and have a site up in minutes was so appealing a few years back with a lot of hosting providers but you ran into a lot of issues like updates, praying that plugins didn't break on upgrades, DB corruptions and so on. With Jekyll, you could fall back on HTML, CSS and JS and create "dynamic" static sites which let you focus on the building instead of the managing. This was important for me, for example for my site. Although my writings date 2013 on my site, I've been writing on the web for much longer. So where is the archive pre 2013? Gone because it got lost in a DB somewhere. Exhausted by always having to maintain a system instead of creating content, when I stumbled on Jekyll, I was sold.
Fast track to 2018 and there is a lot to be excited about with static and the JAMstack scene. I've written about some of my excitement back in 2016 for Forestry. But with the entry of companies like Forestry and Netlify, I find it easier, cheaper and faster to get up and running with a static site. Some thing like Forestry allows you to adopt Hugo or Jekyll as a CMS where multiple authors can be supported. Which I think was a huge roadblock for bigger entities to adopt static. Netlify provides hosting, CDN, SSL and build and deployment which is phenomenal. It integrates well with BitBucket and GitHub. They also have some killer features such as forms that you can collect submissions from with just normal markup. Or lambda functions from within Netlify.
Really you can get creative with the JAMstack as long as you know the benefits and the limitations. But with services coming about these days, I can see a lot of the limitations disappearing. One use case is e-commerce for static or commenting. Or in Spell It Out's case, a lot of the steps are still manual to me. Which I don't mind since I like to curate the quality of the content, but there is a limit. I think I could eventually get to a point of automation for a lot, if not all my problems, but just haven't had the brain power to do so.
But would love to see more examples of projects that are successfully using the JAMstack. As a creative, static sites and the JAMstack has really allowed me to hash out my ideas quickly instead of worrying about frameworks, databases and servers.
I love it b/c you can host your site for free in a lot of cases. That's my #1 reason for using JAMstack.