editable-website VS lowtechguys

Been dedicating a ton of time to this goal lately.

I released a "SvelteKit template for building CMS-free editable websites" earlier this year and the idea has evolved since. I started out with using Postgres + MinIO for storage, but have switched entirely to SQLite. I also added an in-place image cropper, to resize and optimize images on the client side (WebP output) before uploading and storing them in SQLite. I chose Svelte because it's easy to build classic Web pages (with minimal JS overhead), and at same time implement the reactive layer (e.g. editing) on top of it (will be loaded async). However we are also evaluating the possibility to port this to a LAMP stack at some point. Oh and everything is dynamic here, no build steps involved, edits are live immediately.

Just launched my first client project using this approach:

https://trails-shop.at?editable=true (hit the red button in the bottom-right corner)

Project website: https://editable.website

The editor payload now is loaded on demand (after you click edit), so it's truly progressively enhanced now. :)

Thank you Nils Kjellman for the patch. https://github.com/michael/editable-website/pull/8

I use something very similar on https://lunar.fyi and https://lowtechguys.com but I wouldn’t call this “simple” anymore.

They use Jinja templating, I prefer Slim (https://github.com/slim-template/slim#syntax-example) which has a more Pythonic syntax (there is plim [0] in Python for that)

I use Tailwind as well for terse styling and fast experimentation (allows me to write a darkMode-aware and responsive 100 line CSS in a single line with about 10 classes)

For interaction I can write CoffeeScript directly in the page [1] and have it compiled by plim.

I run a Caddy static server [2] and use Syncthing [3] to have every file save deployed instantly to my Hetzner server.

I use entr [4] and livereloadx [5] to rebuild the pages and do hot reload on file save. All the commands are managed in a simple Makefile [6]

———

You can already see how the footnotes take up a large chunk of this comment, this is not my idea of simple. Sure, the end result is readable static HTML and I never have to fight obscure React errors, but it’s a high effort setup for starters.

Simple for me would be: write markdown files for pages, a simple CSS for general styling (should be optional), click to deploy on my domain. Images should automatically be resized to multiple sizes and optimized, videos re-encoded for smaller filesize etc.

I have mostly implemented that for myself (https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/How%20I%20write%20this%20blog...) but it feels fragile. I’d rather pay for a professional solution.

[0] https://plim.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[1] https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/lowtechguys/blob/main/src/rcmd...

[2] https://caddyserver.com/docs/command-line#caddy-file-server

[3] https://syncthing.net

[4] https://github.com/eradman/entr

[5] https://nitoyon.github.io/livereloadx/

[6] https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/lowtechguys/blob/main/Makefile

One less known use case for this is creating animated UI demos, which as a dev I find harder to do using video editing software.

I used it to create the simple demo on the rcmd frontpage: https://lowtechguys.com/rcmd

This is the code, where I'm just animating elements of an SVG I previously created with Sketch: https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/lowtechguys/blob/main/src/rcmd...

I'm also doing the same thing for the Lunar frontpage: https://lunar.fyi/

But because Lunar's demo is a lot more resource intensive, I pre-rendered it into a video, and heavily optimized it for each screen size, in H.265, WEBM and H.264.