In The No-db Landscape I wrote about the differences between “flat-file” CMSs and static site generators. Today we’ll have a look at the idea of a “Post-CMS” and some new developments. I didn’t make up it up, but I love the idea of a “Post CMS” world and it should resonate with anyone who has devoted countless hours to installing, configuring, updating and coding big content management systems. To my mind, “post-CMS” means the disaggregation and, in many cases, elimination of the component parts of a CMS.

Here are some options for adding search and/or filters to your static website. These have various approaches, costs and ease of implementation. Lunr.js (plugins: Jeyll, Metalsmith) List.js Swiftype Tipue Search Google Custom Search Engine Tapir Jekyll search with JSON The less-technically inclined may want to look at something like Swiftype (paid, but has a limited free option), Tapir or Tipue. I use List.js extensively for filtering and recommend it highly.

Here are some of the blog posts that first got me excited about the potential for static site generators: “Meet the Obama campaign’s $250 million fundraising platform”, by Kyle Rush “The Static Web Returns”, by Rob Muhlestein “How We Build CMS-Free Websites”, by Dave Cole at Development Seed Why? “The Great Web Slowdown [INFOGRAPHIC]“, by Tammy Everts “Welcome to the Post-CMS World”, by Ben Balter Not the app! “Healthcare.gov: Code Developed by the People and for the People, Released Back to the People” by Alex Howard at The Atlantic

I’m constantly on the lookout for sophisticated and interesting uses of static site generators. Here’s the forward thinking Vox Media on their use of Middleman as part of their publishing strategy: In a nutshell, our Editorial Apps system consists of a static Middleman site, which is populated from one or more Google Spreadsheets at build time (using our middleman-google-drive extension, which we’ll talk about in a future article), and then deployed to Chorus by doing a git push and using git post-receive hooks, in a way not unlike deploying an app to Heroku.

With the addition of collections in Jekyll 2.0 there are a lot of choices one can make about how to structure their site. Besides collections, now you can also add JSON files to the _data directory. I put together this decision tree to help anyone who needs it. This, of course, reflects my own way of thinking about content in a static site generator context, specifically applied to Jekyll. One thing I love about not using a database is that your content is much closer to its original form: documents are documents, data is data.

Today I spoke for the 2014 class at the CUNY Publishing Institute run by John Oakes of OR Books. Here’s a great article John wrote about the Institute for the Journal of Electronic Publishing: “By the Book: A New Approach to Teaching the Art of Book Publishing”. Here are the slides from my talk: And, while they weren’t part of the slides, we also talked about using Markdown when writing for the web and static site generators.

I wrote a brief piece on seeing Colm Tóibín interview László Krasznahorkai at a PEN World Voices Festival event. It was a truly fascinating conversation. Here’s an excerpt: I found one of the most interesting facts about Mr. Krasznahorkai is the way he combines his love of travel (or more likely, love of being in different places) with his love of music. He said that he plays several instruments and that while traveling he seeks out music, but will then, the very next day, try to find the instrument that he heard and play it himself.

It’s no coincidence that as I’ve become obsessed with website performance I’ve also become enamored with building sites with no database. They’re unequivocally faster, simpler to maintain and build, and more secure and stable than database-driven websites. There are tradeoffs of course, but in my view well worth it. I don’t understand the talk I see about static sites being for “hackers” or small or simple sites. I’ve seen some large, complex and highly trafficked sites built this way.

An abreviated form of this article is available as a Gist on Github What is Markdown? Markdown is a formatting syntax that allows you to write in plain text in any editing program, but still format your document like you would with a word processor. It was created to convert plain text into HTML for publishing on the web and happens to be super easy to write and just as easy to read even without being converted.

The Very Brief History In 2012 developers for the Obama re-election campaign moved from the ExpressionEngine-based website of the prior campaign to a practically retro HTML site with no content management system. Only this wasn’t 1999 and the website was actually quite modern, having been generated by the popular open source software called Jekyll1. A hugely succesful site 2, it had over 81 million page views and was a model of performance and stability.

I surfaced an old short story of mine a while back and published it on the new publishing platform, Medium. You can read the story at Medium, (Medium says it will only take five minutes) but here’s the first sentence: On the train this morning I stood next to a man reading the same book I was reading and on the same page. Murakami on the Train

I wrote a piece called What an Author Site Should Look Like and published it on the new publishing platform Medium. You can read it there, but here’s an excerpt: Nobody Cares About You This goes for any website. Readers don’t spend a lot of time on any website and they click very little. Blogs and about pages are often draws, but that’s it. Any website should do as little as possible and be about the person visiting it, not an overdesigned marketing-copy-ladened beast.