Simple: it's easy to secure your site. Why would you want HTTPS for a simple static html set of pages? Troy Hunt explains it better than I can. (blog post if you don't want to watch the video)
You can get SSL certificates for free from LetsEncrypt. They are good for three months and are designed to be renewed automatically. The certbot tool automatically renews them. It demonstrates...
You can get SSL certificates for free from LetsEncrypt. They are good for three months and are designed to be renewed automatically. The certbot tool automatically renews them. It demonstrates control of the domain by requesting a challenge key from LE, then serving it on a special URL or modifying a DNS txt record.
If you're running a server, you can run the certbot and set up a special route through your web server (nginx, Apache, etc).
You can get the ssl keys by running certbot manually and and setting the DNS challenge key directly. Here's an example that is also using namecheap.. However, you'd have to repeat every three months, so if you don't have a way to automate it, the $6/y might be worth it.
A few static site providers also provide letsencrypt cert implementation. AWS, for instance, does this for their S3 service (though IIRC you may also need to route your domain to their services as...
A few static site providers also provide letsencrypt cert implementation. AWS, for instance, does this for their S3 service (though IIRC you may also need to route your domain to their services as well, which has a cost).
Yeah, there are lots of integrations for LE. It's a great service and one of my favorite examples of the "good" side of the Internet. I assumed LE was what Cloudflare was using, but based on the...
Yeah, there are lots of integrations for LE. It's a great service and one of my favorite examples of the "good" side of the Internet.
I assumed LE was what Cloudflare was using, but based on the certificates, they appear to be using a Google product.
Other than HTTPS (how do you know you're looking at the actual site the owner intended it to be?), Cloudflare operates a massive global content delivery network that can push that content closer...
Other than HTTPS (how do you know you're looking at the actual site the owner intended it to be?), Cloudflare operates a massive global content delivery network that can push that content closer to your users. A battle-tested front door that you can use for free and relatively easy to setup.
Fast websites are a joy to browse. Your random pile of HTML pages hosted in a server in the US is still subject of the laws of physics when a user from NZ decides to browse it for the first time. Now replace that blog with say, a static site for a small business. Now the stakes are much higher when you want that site to grow your business. Walmart has a whole slide deck on why page performance matters. Even if that small business website isn't operating on the scale of Amazon, you don't want a slow site to be a factor that stalls a business given the relative ease of setting it up.
Even if you've never contributed to something like the Runescape Wiki, readers can still perceive how fast that wiki loads even for the occasional search of information.
One of my favorite things about the Pages offering is the preview builds letting you do an end-to-end check that gets deployed automatically at preview.example.com, as well as individual builds...
One of my favorite things about the Pages offering is the preview builds letting you do an end-to-end check that gets deployed automatically at preview.example.com, as well as individual builds deployed at (git short hash).example.com.
Push to preview, get review or sign off from whoever, then merge to main and prod is automatically updated. You can also set the sub directories that the deployment watches so that changes that won't result in a build change don't create a deployment.
It matters less for a single user static site than my use case (AstroJS) but still very nice.
Here's the doc It's configured by default, so if you haven't seen it, it's probably because you've just been pushing to main? Even with that, you can check your build history, and if you look at...
It's configured by default, so if you haven't seen it, it's probably because you've just been pushing to main? Even with that, you can check your build history, and if you look at the individual builds, there should be a visit link that will open the git hash deployment.
If you are actively using branches (I don't know how publii works), the default for previews is to deploy every push on every branch. You may want to go into the config and narrow the preview branch config to a subset so you don't go over the 500 deployments per month limit.
Edit: for clarity, even if it's a static site, there is a (nearly trivial) deployment step done by cloud flare.
Yeah I've kept it simple and just pushed to main. This is a great starting point, thanks for making me aware of it! It's felt wrong to "play in production" so to speak, so it'll be nice to see a...
Yeah I've kept it simple and just pushed to main. This is a great starting point, thanks for making me aware of it! It's felt wrong to "play in production" so to speak, so it'll be nice to see a preview first
The only real reason I can guess is that free is free, and Cloudflare is one of the only providers that would let you host your own custom site for no cost.
The only real reason I can guess is that free is free, and Cloudflare is one of the only providers that would let you host your own custom site for no cost.
Neat little write up. The point where you decided to shift to Cloudflare pages could use a bit more context imho. The entire bit before that you focus on using a S3 bucket and the shift to...
Neat little write up. The point where you decided to shift to Cloudflare pages could use a bit more context imho. The entire bit before that you focus on using a S3 bucket and the shift to Cloudflare pages is quite sudden.
I also would have liked to see what the process of setting up a website with publii itself was. Did you use a template, create a template? I wasn't aware of the tool itself, I think the concept of having a desktop application to manage your website is quite interesting.
Good point, I will write up a future blog post talking about Cloudflare Pages. In the article I only briefly touched on the architecture being less secure. The short answer for the transition is:...
Good point, I will write up a future blog post talking about Cloudflare Pages. In the article I only briefly touched on the architecture being less secure. The short answer for the transition is: unlimited bandwidth!
There's a screenshot at the end of the post showing the Publii UI, but I like your idea of talking about the Publii process from end to end now that everything is set up. I'll write about that too!
If Cloudflare isn’t one’s thing for some reason, there are several other services like Netlify that also offer a free tier and git-repo-centric workflow. The setup is a touch more involved than...
If Cloudflare isn’t one’s thing for some reason, there are several other services like Netlify that also offer a free tier and git-repo-centric workflow.
The setup is a touch more involved than the old days of uploading files via FTP, but after that it’s smoother and comes with automatic versioning and backups which is pretty sweet.
Neat! I have been using cloudflare pages with Astro JS and it's worked quite well. So far all my sites are static as well, but I did a proof of concept setting up an API endpoint with Cloudflare...
Neat! I have been using cloudflare pages with Astro JS and it's worked quite well. So far all my sites are static as well, but I did a proof of concept setting up an API endpoint with Cloudflare Workers that could receive a form submission and send an email with Resend (which also has a generous free tier). It seems like they are constantly adding features. It reminds me of the very early days of the AWS offerings, when many of the features lacked polish. But the core stuff works quite well, and it's hard to beat free.
Looks like Workers has a 100k requests/day limit. That's a lot of requests to play with! And 3,000 free emails per month from Resend is pretty nice as well
Looks like Workers has a 100k requests/day limit. That's a lot of requests to play with! And 3,000 free emails per month from Resend is pretty nice as well
Why would anyone want cloudflare on top of a simple static html set of pages?
Simple: it's easy to secure your site. Why would you want HTTPS for a simple static html set of pages? Troy Hunt explains it better than I can. (blog post if you don't want to watch the video)
I have SSL/ HTTPS through Namecheap, but I think I pay $6 a year for the privilege.
You can get SSL certificates for free from LetsEncrypt. They are good for three months and are designed to be renewed automatically. The certbot tool automatically renews them. It demonstrates control of the domain by requesting a challenge key from LE, then serving it on a special URL or modifying a DNS txt record.
If you're running a server, you can run the certbot and set up a special route through your web server (nginx, Apache, etc).
You can get the ssl keys by running certbot manually and and setting the DNS challenge key directly. Here's an example that is also using namecheap.. However, you'd have to repeat every three months, so if you don't have a way to automate it, the $6/y might be worth it.
A few static site providers also provide letsencrypt cert implementation. AWS, for instance, does this for their S3 service (though IIRC you may also need to route your domain to their services as well, which has a cost).
Yeah, there are lots of integrations for LE. It's a great service and one of my favorite examples of the "good" side of the Internet.
I assumed LE was what Cloudflare was using, but based on the certificates, they appear to be using a Google product.
Other than HTTPS (how do you know you're looking at the actual site the owner intended it to be?), Cloudflare operates a massive global content delivery network that can push that content closer to your users. A battle-tested front door that you can use for free and relatively easy to setup.
Fast websites are a joy to browse. Your random pile of HTML pages hosted in a server in the US is still subject of the laws of physics when a user from NZ decides to browse it for the first time. Now replace that blog with say, a static site for a small business. Now the stakes are much higher when you want that site to grow your business. Walmart has a whole slide deck on why page performance matters. Even if that small business website isn't operating on the scale of Amazon, you don't want a slow site to be a factor that stalls a business given the relative ease of setting it up.
Even if you've never contributed to something like the Runescape Wiki, readers can still perceive how fast that wiki loads even for the occasional search of information.
Hmmmmm.... I will have to ask some Kiwis and Aussies to test the speed of my website.
I’m Aussie, give me a URL and I’ll let you know if I notice anything with regards to performance
One of my favorite things about the Pages offering is the preview builds letting you do an end-to-end check that gets deployed automatically at preview.example.com, as well as individual builds deployed at (git short hash).example.com.
Push to preview, get review or sign off from whoever, then merge to main and prod is automatically updated. You can also set the sub directories that the deployment watches so that changes that won't result in a build change don't create a deployment.
It matters less for a single user static site than my use case (AstroJS) but still very nice.
Whaaat that's awesome. How do you do that?
Here's the doc
It's configured by default, so if you haven't seen it, it's probably because you've just been pushing to main? Even with that, you can check your build history, and if you look at the individual builds, there should be a visit link that will open the git hash deployment.
If you are actively using branches (I don't know how publii works), the default for previews is to deploy every push on every branch. You may want to go into the config and narrow the preview branch config to a subset so you don't go over the 500 deployments per month limit.
Edit: for clarity, even if it's a static site, there is a (nearly trivial) deployment step done by cloud flare.
Yeah I've kept it simple and just pushed to main. This is a great starting point, thanks for making me aware of it! It's felt wrong to "play in production" so to speak, so it'll be nice to see a preview first
The only real reason I can guess is that free is free, and Cloudflare is one of the only providers that would let you host your own custom site for no cost.
Free SSL? Now that I can get behind.
Free SSL is basically Let's Encrypt's whole schtick, and it works really well. I was referring to free hosting.
Neat little write up. The point where you decided to shift to Cloudflare pages could use a bit more context imho. The entire bit before that you focus on using a S3 bucket and the shift to Cloudflare pages is quite sudden.
I also would have liked to see what the process of setting up a website with publii itself was. Did you use a template, create a template? I wasn't aware of the tool itself, I think the concept of having a desktop application to manage your website is quite interesting.
Good point, I will write up a future blog post talking about Cloudflare Pages. In the article I only briefly touched on the architecture being less secure. The short answer for the transition is: unlimited bandwidth!
There's a screenshot at the end of the post showing the Publii UI, but I like your idea of talking about the Publii process from end to end now that everything is set up. I'll write about that too!
If Cloudflare isn’t one’s thing for some reason, there are several other services like Netlify that also offer a free tier and git-repo-centric workflow.
The setup is a touch more involved than the old days of uploading files via FTP, but after that it’s smoother and comes with automatic versioning and backups which is pretty sweet.
Neat! I have been using cloudflare pages with Astro JS and it's worked quite well. So far all my sites are static as well, but I did a proof of concept setting up an API endpoint with Cloudflare Workers that could receive a form submission and send an email with Resend (which also has a generous free tier). It seems like they are constantly adding features. It reminds me of the very early days of the AWS offerings, when many of the features lacked polish. But the core stuff works quite well, and it's hard to beat free.
Looks like Workers has a 100k requests/day limit. That's a lot of requests to play with! And 3,000 free emails per month from Resend is pretty nice as well