Link Blog in a Static Site
12 comments
·January 9, 2025planetjones
rednafi
Yeah, the whole point of this is tracking the progress of something, not vanity interaction. This is why I decided to leave it out of the main RSS feed to avoid spamming readers.
marcosdumay
So... you want to use your blog as some kind of a log ported to the web?
Yeah, most tools are built to support something different.
null
pryelluw
“Not turn into a content junkie, churning out slop I wouldn’t want to read myself.”
What a beautiful value to have.
ftio
I generate the Bookmarks [1] section of my static site from the public bookmarks in my Pinboard account.
Since I host with Netlify, I've written a lightweight Netlify function that looks at my Pinboard account for changes. If there are changes, it simply re-runs the static site build. During the build, Lektor, the static site generator, runs a custom plugin I've written that generates the link blog page from the Pinboard API.
Definitely more work than it was "worth", but as a person who doesn't get to write lots of code every day, it was a blast putting it all together.
rednafi
This pattern of:
1. polling for external changes somewhere
2. updating some pages on a static site (by incorporating the changes from step 1) and rebuilding it
is incredibly powerful. It allows us to make a static site behave almost like a read-only dynamic one. There needs to be a name for this—it’s hard to discuss it without one.
ggpsv
A bit like PESOS (Publish elsewhere, syndicate own site). I do this when archiving my Mastodon posts in my own static site [0].
[0]: https://garrido.io/notes/archiving-and-syndicating-mastodon-...
rednafi
PESOS is pretty good. I was aware of POSSE but not PESOS.
dgl
One name for it is PESOS[1] ("Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site"), although that doesn't necessitate it be static, but requiring it be static is mixing the implementation with the user experience anyway.
rmnclmnt
This pattern is used all over the place, and for good reason (especially when people get their minds on combining CI/CD and static deployments).
Simon Willison groked the name « Baked Data »: even though it was in the context of Datasette (which requires a backend to run but the SQLite db is embedded and read-only), it is pretty safe the term can be applied for static websites also!
Macha
Hasn't it already had a name for years? A headless CMS
On my personal site (also built with Hugo) I post images of food I have eaten and media I have consumed. I could use Instagram, Bluesky or X but I want the content to be mine and stay mine. And I am doing it because I like to blog things not because I want the interaction on social media.
https://www.planetjones.net/food.html
https://www.planetjones.net/reviews.html