Does your site stand out in a field of stars?
One of the first arguments thrown around about sites built with static site generators is that they aren’t SEO friendly.
But don’t worry, that doesn’t have to be the case. Let’s look at ways to make sure your JAMstack site is at the top of its SEO game.
Photo by Lotus Carroll
So you’ve heard about the JAMstack for front-end development, and have been convinced that this is the best way to develop and host sites and applications. But how do you get started?
Here at Netlify, we realize that not everyone is a developer (yet). So if you are at a loss as to how to get started, we’re here to help.
Photo by Lotus Carroll
So you’ve heard about the JAMstack, and have been convinced that this is the best way to develop and host sites and and applications. But how do you get started?
Here at Netlify, we realize that not everyone is a developer (yet). So if you are at a loss as to how to get started, we’re here to help.
Today, we’re going to look at how to host a website built with Lektor on Netlify, including setting up continuous deployment.
The interesting thing about Lektor is that it comes with a built-in GUI CMS and a Mac app. This makes content creation less daunting for newer users.
Let’s start from scratch. If you already have a Lektor site set up, you can skip straight to the Preparing for deployment or Connecting to Netlify sections.
Welcome to Netlify CMS, the first static site CMS system that can easily be integrated with almost any static site generator!
It sounds too good to be true, but the age where static sites were defined by a lack of dynamic content, a lack of user interactivity and a lack of a CMS system is finally over!
In this guide, we’ll show you how to install and configure your own copy of our jekyll-netlify-cms template.
This guide assumes that you have Ruby and bundler installed
Today, we’re going to look at how to host a website built with Lektor on Netlify, including setting up continuous deployment.
The interesting thing about Lektor is that it comes with a built-in GUI CMS and a Mac app. This makes content creation less daunting for newer users.
Let’s start from scratch. If you already have a Lektor site set up, you can skip straight to the Preparing for deployment or Connecting to Netlify sections.
Image courtesy: Colin Brough
Often, when you read lists about reasons to use a static website generator, they are followed by a list of reasons why you shouldn’t.
Other times, when you are researching static vs. dynamic, you’ll stumble across a grammatically challenged site where some WordPress developer is trying to convince you that using cutting-edge, modern build tools will somehow be the death knell of your site.
Your website is overkill, and it’s killing your traffic.
There’s no reason to have a massive, unwieldy CMS with a database when you could have a fast, secure and beautiful static site. But how do you know that you can use a static site?
When was the last time you updated your CMS software and plugins? By conservative estimate, 70% of all WordPress installs are vulnerable to known security exploits. In 2014, millions of Drupal sites were vulnerable due to a bug in the code, and Drupal told users that if they hadn’t updated within 7 hours of the announcement, they should assume that they were hacked. That’s a really small window.
With a static site, you don’t have to worry about malicious code being injected into your site when users visit it. Static sites are built on a production machine (probably the machine you are reading this on) by static site generators, which take your code and spit out flat HTML files with CSS and JavaScript. When a user requests a page from your site, the server just sends them the file for that page, instead of building that page from various assets each time. No build process means standard hacking attacks like scripting or database security exploits just don’t work.
What does a browser do? It renders HTML, CSS and JavaScript into a human-viewable format. No matter what type of site you use, a legacy dynamic site or a modern static one, what gets sent from the server to your browser is HTML, CSS and JavaScript. So why take the time and resources to render your site every single time someone visits when you can have a pre-built version ready to go? There’s a reason that a normal static site hosted on a CDN is often 10 times faster time-to-first-byte than a site built with a legacy CMS.
Additionally, by hosting your static site on a CDN, you can serve it from whichever node is closest to your users. Someone viewing your site in a coffee shop in Vienna pulls from a European server, not a server farm in the Silicon Valley. The same goes for your Japanese visitors, or a user just down the street.
Your basic site built with WordPress or Drupal starts out as a one-size-fits-all solution that is then customized by bolting on plugins. A lot of plugins. Seriously, so many plugins. A quick Google search for “must have WordPress plugins” yields a front page where nine of the ten posts list 20 plugins or more as “must have”.
With a static site, you can get lean and mean, with a tool that does exactly what you need it to. Like to blog? Try out Jekyll or Hugo. Want a high performance marketing site? Make like the pros and use Middleman or Roots. Trying to showcase your visual portfolio? Maybe Cactus is right for you. And if you want something so finely tuned and streamlined to your complete specifications, Metalsmith is definitely the way to go.
Your WordPress install (especially if you are hosting it yourself) is a Frankenstein’s monster of cobbled together software and hardware, and probably looks something like this:
If you don’t want to host your own, then you just have to hope that your host keeps its PHP and MySQL up to date, so that you aren’t exposed to those pesky security vulnerabilities that crop up every now and again. Then there is the upkeep. Make sure you’ve allotted time to manage all these dependencies. And some more time in case an updated plugin or theme breaks something.
A static site, when generated, is capable of being hosted on any web server that can return HTML files (which gives you a whole bunch of options). Of course, you’ll want to take advantage of the possibilities afforded to you with a static site by finding a host that allows for things like continuous deployment, instant cache invalidation, automated deploys and more. But you can leave that to somebody else, and instead of installing, managing and updating your CMS, you can focus on developing your site.
Does that look familiar (and painful)? If you’ve managed to avoid it with your own site thus far…congratulations, you are in rare company. Obviously, working without a database you won’t see that, but static site reliability goes beyond database errors. The beauty of serving up flat HTML files is that they can be hosted anywhere and everywhere, like on a CDN. Let’s say there’s a DDoS attack on the server where your legacy site is hosted. Sorry, but you might just be screwed for a few hours (or days). That same attack hits a node where your static site is hosted? Your site just gets served up from the next closest node. Your visitors never even notice that there’s a problem.
It’s completely possible to design a site on your production machine and then upload it to a host (whether via a command line tool or a drag-and-drop interface), but the majority of developers will end up using some sort of version control system like Git. As a developer, you probably already know how much of a lifesaver this can be on projects, but it’s just as big a deal when it comes to developing websites as well. Screw-ups can be rolled back to earlier commits, meaning that short of deleting your online repository, you can always go back to a previous version of your site with a few keystrokes. And if you are a Netlify customer, you can roll back to a previous deploy with just two clicks.
The beauty of using a static website generator is in the developer experience. Build tools will output your HTML to a particular directory on your build machine, and nearly all tools include a local web server, which allows you to check and double check your progress as you go. You have the security of knowing that your site will look exactly the same to your visitors as it does to you as a developer.
You’ve hit it big! Your site has gone viral, and you are seeing absolutely massive response and increased visits thanks to getting namechecked across the social media spectrum. Did you anticipate that this might happen? Did you overprovision massively, just in case this happened? Are you paying for huge chunks of bandwidth monthly, hoping for (and fearing) an explosion of traffic.
Or are you making frantic calls to your service provider to get back up online after you made it to Reddit’s front page? Your plan couldn’t handle that kind of attention, and now you are down (and got dragged out of bed or away from the dinner table to try and resurrect things).
And when your traffic means that you have to scale, it means that you are paying for all that complex code to run on your server at every page request. And that’s going to hit you right where it hurts: the wallet.
With static, scalability is barely an issue. Of course it scales! Increased requests mean increased pages served, but no extra work in building those pages. With some providers, scale is built in, while with others like Amazon’s S3, all you have to pay for is the increased bandwidth.
If all the heavy lifting of building a static site is done on your production machine, then what exactly is it that you are paying for with hosting? Asset storage, basically. Your static HTML files take up next to no space, and so your service is usually priced accordingly. Instead, you can spend your money where it really matters, on the features that make your site faster and your life easier, features like atomic deploys and asset fingerprinting to make sure your site is always globally consistent, or git integration and automated builds, so your site is always up to date with your latest changes, and snapshot versioning and instant rollbacks (in case your latest changes break something).
So what’s keeping you from moving to the world of static web development? Does the migration process seem too daunting? Many tools like Jekyll have the ability to import your old WordPress posts. Can’t walk away from your backend database just yet? With Netlify, you can use proxying and redirects to point to your server when necessary, just like Sam Deere of Giving What We Can outlined in this post.
No matter what tools you prefer to develop in, whether it be Node, Ruby, Python or something else, there’s a static tool for you. We’ve taken a look before, or you can learn more yourself by visiting staticgen.com, the best source for information on static website generators on the internet.
There’s never been a better time to take advantage of the speed, security and reliability of static web generators and the development environment around them. So what are you waiting for?
Very often, websites are overkill.
There’s no reason to have a massive, unwieldy CMS with a database when you could have a fast, secure and beautiful static site. But how do you know that you can use a static site?
When was the last time you updated your CMS software and plugins? By conservative estimate, 70% of all WordPress installs are vulnerable to known security exploits. In 2014, millions of Drupal sites were vulnerable due to a bug in the code, and Drupal told users that if they hadn’t updated within 7 hours of the announcement, they should assume that they were hacked. That’s a really small window.
With a static site, you don’t have to worry about malicious code being injected into your site when users visit it. Static sites are built on a production machine (probably the machine you are reading this on) by static site generators, which take your code and spit out flat HTML files with CSS and JavaScript. When a user requests a page from your site, the server just sends them the file for that page, instead of building that page from various assets each time. No build process means standard hacking attacks like scripting or database security exploits just don’t work.
What does a browser do? It renders HTML, CSS and JavaScript into a human-viewable format. No matter what type of site you use, a legacy dynamic site or a modern static one, what gets sent from the server to your browser is HTML, CSS and JavaScript. So why take the time and resources to render your site every single time someone visits when you can have a pre-built version ready to go? There’s a reason that a normal static site hosted on a CDN is often 10 times faster time-to-first-byte than a site built with a legacy CMS.
Additionally, by hosting your static site on a CDN, you can serve it from whichever node is closest to your users. Someone viewing your site in a coffee shop in Vienna pulls from a European server, not a server farm in the Silicon Valley. The same goes for your Japanese visitors, or a user just down the street.
Your basic site built with WordPress or Drupal starts out as a one-size-fits-all solution that is then customized by bolting on plugins. A lot of plugins. Seriously, so many plugins. A quick Google search for “must have WordPress plugins” yields a front page where nine of the ten posts list 20 plugins or more as “must have”.
With a static site, you can get lean and mean, with a tool that does exactly what you need it to. Like to blog? Try out Jekyll or Hugo. Want a high performance marketing site? Make like the pros and use Middleman or Roots. Trying to showcase your visual portfolio? Maybe Cactus is right for you. And if you want something so finely tuned and streamlined to your complete specifications, Metalsmith is definitely the way to go.
Your WordPress install (especially if you are hosting it yourself) is a Frankenstein’s monster of cobbled together software and hardware, and probably looks something like this:
a machine running your preferred distro of Linux a web server running Nginx or Apache PHP with its associated extensions and web server configurations MySQL WordPress (obviously) All the plugins you need (see #3) Your theme and template code
If you don’t want to host your own, then you just have to hope that your host keeps its PHP and MySQL up to date, so that you aren’t exposed to those pesky security vulnerabilities that crop up every now and again. Then there is the upkeep. Make sure you’ve allotted time to manage all these dependencies. And some more time in case an updated plugin or theme breaks something.
A static site, when generated, is capable of being hosted on any web server that can return HTML files (which gives you a whole bunch of options). Of course, you’ll want to take advantage of the possibilities afforded to you with a static site by finding a host that allows for things like continuous deployment, instant cache invalidation, automated deploys and more. But you can leave that to somebody else, and instead of installing, managing and updating your CMS, you can focus on developing your site.
Does that look familiar (and painful)? If you’ve managed to avoid it with your own site thus far…congratulations, you are in rare company. Obviously, working without a database you won’t see that, but static site reliability goes beyond database errors. The beauty of serving up flat HTML files is that they can be hosted anywhere and everywhere, like on a CDN. Let’s say there’s a DDoS attack on the server where your legacy site is hosted. Sorry, but you might just be screwed for a few hours (or days). That same attack hits a node where your static site is hosted? Your site just gets served up from the next closest node. Your visitors never even notice that there’s a problem.
It’s completely possible to design a site on your production machine and then upload it to a host (whether via a command line tool or a drag-and-drop interface), but the majority of developers will end up using some sort of version control system like Git. As a developer, you probably already know how much of a lifesaver this can be on projects, but it’s just as big a deal when it comes to developing websites as well. Screw-ups can be rolled back to earlier commits, meaning that short of deleting your online repository, you can always go back to a previous version of your site with a few keystrokes. And if you are a Netlify customer, you can roll back to a previous deploy with just two clicks.
The beauty of using a static website generator is in the developer experience. Build tools will output your HTML to a particular directory on your build machine, and nearly all tools include a local web server, which allows you to check and double check your progress as you go. You have the security of knowing that your site will look exactly the same to your visitors as it does to you as a developer.
You’ve hit it big! Your site has gone viral, and you are seeing absolutely massive response and increased visits thanks to getting namechecked across the social media spectrum. Did you anticipate that this might happen? Did you overprovision massively, just in case this happened? Are you paying for huge chunks of bandwidth monthly, hoping for (and fearing) an explosion of traffic.
Or are you making frantic calls to your service provider to get back up online after you made it to Reddit’s front page? Your plan couldn’t handle that kind of attention, and now you are down (and got dragged out of bed or away from the dinner table to try and resurrect things).
And when your traffic means that you have to scale, it means that you are paying for all that complex code to run on your server at every page request. And that’s going to hit you right where it hurts: the wallet.
With static, scalability is barely an issue. Of course it scales! Increased requests mean increased pages served, but no extra work in building those pages. With some providers, scale is built in, while with others like Amazon’s S3, all you have to pay for is the increased bandwidth.
If all the heavy lifting of building a static site is done on your production machine, then what exactly is it that you are paying for with hosting? Asset storage, basically. Your static HTML files take up next to no space, and so your service is usually priced accordingly. Instead, you can spend your money where it really matters, on the features that make your site faster and your life easier, features like atomic deploys and asset fingerprinting to make sure your site is always globally consistent, or git integration and automated builds, so your site is always up to date with your latest changes, and snapshot versioning and instant rollbacks (in case your latest changes break something).
So what’s keeping you from moving to the world of static web development? Does the migration process seem too daunting? Many tools like Jekyll have the ability to import your old WordPress posts. Can’t walk away from your backend database just yet? With Netlify, you can use proxying and redirects to point to your server when necessary, just like Sam Deere of Giving What We Can outlined in this post.
No matter what tools you prefer to develop in, whether it be Node, Ruby, Python or something else, there’s a static tool for you. We’ve taken a look before, or you can learn more yourself by visiting staticgen.com, the best source for information on static website generators on the internet.
There’s never been a better time to take advantage of the speed, security and reliability of static web generators and the development environment around them. So what are you waiting for?
These days, speed and security is the name of the game.
Website visitors abandon sites after just a second or two of delay, and database hacks have become commonplace. Just look at the news to see the latest scandal laid bare by hackers who gained access to sensitive information due to poorly maintained WordPress or Drupal installs.
That’s why developers, agencies and producers of web content are turning to static website generators. With modern browsers, sites built with JavaScript, APIs and Markup offer the ability to serve highly dynamic content without the shackles of the standard, painfully slow (and expensive) backend database and a server building a site each time a visitor makes a request. Flat files can be served from CDNs around the world, increasing both speed and uptime, and managing static sites with version control systems like Git means the process of creating and updating sites is highly efficient.
Your website’s store is painfully slow, and it’s costing you money.
According to a KISSMetrics study, 40% of shoppers will abandon a website that takes longer than 3 seconds to load, and 47% expect a site to load in less than two.
That’s a problem for most eCommerce sites, which are almost always absolutely dependent on heavy back-end databases.
But now, you can harness the speed, security and reliability of a static site to run your online store. Today, we’ll take a look at one such static eCommerce platform, Flatmarket.
Today, we’re going to look at how to host a website built with Phenomic on Netlify, including setting up continuous deployment.
Phenomic is a new static site generator built with ReactJS. React is a hugely popular javascript framework created in-house at Facebook.
With the backing of Facebook, the React programming language has made a huge splash in the last few years.
React is used by Netflix, Imgur, Feedly, AirBnB and more. It exploded in popularity when Facebook open-sourced its Android- and iOS-focused kin React Native in March of 2015. One developer who has taken advantage of the toolkit on offer is Kyle Mathews, the creator of GatsbyJS. Mathews spoke to Netlify after the most recent Static Web Tech Meetup about the benefits of Gatsby, his love for development with React and the idea of JavaScript fatigue.
Photo credit: Eric Fischer
At Netlify, we make a very big deal about speed.
Sites on Netlify are extremely fast, no matter where you are. Part of that is the tools used to build those sites, but an even bigger part is our CDN–or to be more precise, our CDNs, plural.
Netlify offers free 1-click SSL with LetsEncrypt. It’s the very definition of easy.
But some of our customers have reasons for using their own certificates procured from an SSL Certificate Authority. If you are one of those customers, we’ll show you how to install your own certificate here.
Thomas Reynolds is the Technical Director at famed Portland digital agency Instrument.
He’s also the creator of Middleman, one of the most widely used static site generators for large enterprise sites like MailChimp, Sequoia Capitol and Vox Media.
Reynolds recently did a massive overhaul for Middleman v4.0, and presented his changes and thoughts on the category at this month’s SF Static Web Tech Meetup. Following the meetup, Reynolds took a few minutes to talk to Netlify about Middleman’s humble beginnings, the benefits of a git-centric workflow, and why he prefers developing with modern web technologies.
Today we’ll take a look at how to install and setup a basic Sculpin blog site with assets on GitHub, in continuous deployment on Netlify.
Sculpin is a fast static site generator, which uses Twig templates, built on Symfony’s HTTP Kernel and written in PHP. It’s arguably the most mature and well documented static site generator written in PHP.
For those unaware, PHP is a serverside language based on C and has long been used to make dynamic homepages. This isn’t as common as static site generators written in Javascript or Ruby and it will be interesting to see how it works compared with these.
So you’ve splashed out on a personal domain, and want to connect it to your site hosted on Netlify. Great!
Here, we’ll walk you through how to connect your site to your custom domain from most of the popular domain name registrars.
While there is a constantly growing roster of static web tools available for developers of both the professional and amateur stripe, none swings as much weight or garners as much attention as Jekyll.
Its popularity is no surprise, considering Jekyll was created by one of the cofounders of GitHub and is the engine that powers GitHub pages.
Recently we witnessed the launch of Jekyll 3.0, with the final commit being pushed live during a talk by current Jekyll lead Parker Moore at the October edition of the Static Web MeetUp in Wikia’s San Francisco office. After his talk, Moore took some time to chat with Aaron from Netlify about Jekyll, development and the future of static web tech.
How we made Giving What We Can’s switch to Netlify really easy.
Giving What We Can is a charity that encourages people to give more, and give more effectively to charity. We’re part of the effective altruism movement, using reason and evidence to find the best opportunities for giving. Our website is critical to our success — it’s how people learn about our work, and where they go to take our pledge to give 10% of their income to the best charities in the world.
We’ve recently switched from a traditional PHP-based CMS to a static build on Netlify, and I couldn’t be happier with the results. But while making the change, we came up against a fairly thorny problem — what to do about our backend server.
Up until recently I had never even heard of Nanoc.
I stumbled upon this gem of gems (pun intended), while searching for a well documented static site generator with on-going support and a live community.
Nanoc has both in abundance and after checking out their up-to-date and aesthetically pleasing documentation, I quickly grew to like this extremely easy to use static site generator.
In this little guide, we will set up Nanoc and check out its site generation abilities and once we’re up and running locally, we will push the project to GitHub and deploy on Netlify with continuous deployment.
Today we’ll take a look at Punch.
Punch is a static site generator that bills itself as “a simple, intuitive web publishing framework that will delight both designers and developers.”
Foundation hit the scene in 2011 when interaction design company ZURB decided to create a responsive front-end framework for development.
Fast forward to today, and one open-source project is now three: Foundation for Sites, Foundation for Apps, and Foundation for Email. With the release of Foundation 6 and the static site generator Panini, ZURB designer Geoff Kimball presented the new iteration at the Static Web Tech Meetup, and took time to talk to Netlify about his preference for streamlining the build process, Gulp vs. Grunt, and the problem with following the zeitgeist.
Wade Warren is a central figure when it comes to…well, the internet.
Over 30 years in the technology world he’s been a part of 4 IPOs, more than 20 mergers and acquisitions, involved in the creation of what became the Apache webserver at Organic, kicking ass at LoudCloud building the foundation for OpsWare, scaling the infrastructure at Netflix to a massive percentage of all broadband usage, heading operations at VeriSign, and now at Wikia, where he serves as the Vice President of Platform Engineering.
His confidence in the benefits and bright future of the new stack of modern static web tech has led to Wikia both using Netlify, and co-sponsoring the Static Web Tech Meetup with Netlify. At a recent meetup (where we got to be in the room for the launch of Jekyll 3.0!!) Wade took some time to talk to us about the role of static web technology in Wikia’s world.
Today, we’re going to look at how to host a website built with Gatsby on Netlify, including setting up continuous deployment.
Gatsby is a new static site generator, but it’s gaining traction fast! It’s made in what’s probably the only thing as hot as Google’s ‘go’ right now, React.js. React is a hugely popular javascript framework out of Facebook.
Photo credit: Yuri Samoilov
Here’s some news we’re really excited about!
Starting today, we’re offering Free SSL to all our users.
As the first hosting service in the world, Netlify offers full integration with Let’s Encrypt.
With one click install, HTTPS will instantly be available for your sites on all our CDN nodes, and Netlify automatically handles renewals.
Promoting security as a default is really important to us, and SSL has become a must for a number of reasons, like improvement of SEO, better analytics, and of course protection of both users and content. But until now, costs, implementation difficulties, and legacy APIs have stood in the way for many users.
Follow-up on the last days distributed denial of service attacks against our infrastructure.
Tuesday January 12 at 4:50pm PST we got alerted to an incoming DDoS attack. The attack started on the east coast and expanded into a massive DDoS attack simultaneously targeting CDN nodes in New York, San Francisco, Amsterdam and Chicago. It seemed like a clear escalation from the DDoS attack Saturday that only affected our main load balancer.
Your DNS Setup can have a great effect on performance and DDoS resilience.
Early Saturday morning we got alerted by Rackspace that a major DDoS attack was hitting our main load balancer in their Chicago data center.
The DDoS attack was a large, mostly UDP based, volumetric attack sending more than 40GB/s of sustained traffic and overwhelming the network switch in front of the balancer.
Fortunately, the large majority of Netlify sites kept working without any interruption of service as our system automatically detected the attack and started routing traffic away from Rackspace’s Chicago data center.
However, a small number of sites were affected and down from this. They differed from the rest by how their DNS was setup and they were primarily sites that were using the root domain as their canonical domain, rather than prefixing their site with www.
As soon as we detected the problem, we tried to identify all sites affected by the DDoS attack and sent out instructions on how to mitigate this by changing a DNS record and directed them to the Netlify docs that recommends a C-name setup as this prevents downtime from exactly this type of attack.
Our site for Netlify is hosted on www.netlify.com, rather than netlify.com
We call netlify.com the apex domain or root domain.
Some might think that this is merely a cosmetic difference and make whole websites arguing against the www prefix. However, dropping www from your main site domain can have dire consequences because of how DNS records work.
Today, we’re going to look at how to host a project built with Assemble on Netlify, including setting up continuous deployment.
Let’s start from scratch. If you already have an Assemble site set up, you can skip straight to the Connecting to Netlify section.
** No spoilers contained. Really. We haven’t even seen it yet **
Sooo 4 billion (with a b) dollars seems like a steal these days. At least judging from the hype this first Disney instalment is getting.
The Netlify servers are seeing plenty of disturbance in the force too!
We thought we’d celebrate this 7th coming with a quick look at what’s happening on Netlify in terms of STAR WARS.
We picked out 3 sites that are all made with modern static build tools and all hosted with yours truly. And of course, most importantly, are part of a Universe where they have lightsabers which really are reason enough to forcefully try and daydream ourselves up and and away from this World in to a galaxy far far away.
Today I’m writing about Metalsmith.
Metalsmith is a fairly well known static site generator that bills itself as An extremely simple, pluggable static site generator. To me personally, that’s indeed exactly how it felt, like working with a very customizable static site generator, for better or worse. It’s in fact so customizable that it can imitate other static site generators and even has templates for this!
But enough talk, let’s get to the meat and bones.
In this tutorial we will set up a basic Metalsmith demonstration site, with a build file, static assets and some plugins. The aim of this site is to show a simple Metalsmith setup with continuous deployment on Netlify using GitHub.
Today, we’re going to look at how to host a book built with Gitbook on Netlify, including setting up continuous deployment.
Let’s start from scratch. If you already have GitBook set up, you can skip straight to the Connecting to Netlify section.
Today, we’re going to look at how to host a website built with Docpad on Netlify, including setting up continuous deployment.
Let’s start from scratch. If you already have a Docpad site set up, you can skip straight to the Connecting to netlify section.
As you may have seen in yesterday’s newsletter Netlify now has Zapier app in beta.
It lets you integrate form submissions or deploy notifications from Netlify to hundreds of external services like MailChimp, Hipchat, Google Docs, etc,.
What that means is that in a few easy steps you can set up the app to send you a notification whenever a new form is submitted, or a deploy is finished and pushed live. The notification could be a mail, a message in slack or hipchat, or almost anywhere else.
Hi there.
Hope you are having a great week.
We’ve got lot’s of news, so we will get right to it!
We just added Netlify to Zapier and would love for you to help test the beta.
Zapier lets you integrate form submissions or deploy notifications from Netlify to hundreds of external services like MailChimp, Hipchat, Google Docs, etc,.
Today, we’re going to look at how to host a webapp built with Ember on Netlify, including setting up continuous deployment.
Ember is a great framework for creating awesome applications. In fact, Netlify CMS is made with Ember. It has a huge ecosystem and a great asset pipeline out of the box as well, and we’re hosting tons of webapps using Ember on Netlify.
Let’s start from scratch. If you already have an Ember site set up, you can skip straight to the Connecting to Netlify section.
Today, we’re going to look at how to host applications built with AngularJS on Netlify, including setting up continuous deployment.
Let’s start from scratch. If you already have an AngularJS project set up, you can skip straight to the Connecting to Netlify section.
Today, we’re going to look at how to host a website built with Wintersmith on Netlify, including setting up continuous deployment.
Let’s start from scratch. If you already have a Wintersmith site set up, you can skip straight to the Connecting to Netlify section.
Today, we’re going to look at how to host a photo and video portfolio built with Exposé on Netlify, including setting up continuous deployment.
Exposé is a Bash script that turns images and videos into a photoessay similar to jack.ventures or jack.works–the author’s personal blogs.
With a few simple tweaks, Exposé can work with Netlify to continually and consistently update your photo and video content.
Now Netlify gives you detailed control over the post processing we do to your sites.
Netlify does more post-processing than most hosting services. Gzipping, minifying javascript, setting content-addressable URL’s etc. This is part of the reason that modern static sites on Netlify are so much faster.
Not all post processing is always necessary however, so we’re happy to announce that Netlify now gives you detailed control over the post processing we do to your sites.
You can completely disable post processing for sites where you mainly want to share HTML/CSS and don’t care about performance, pretty URLs, form processing or snippet injection.
Apart from that you can control Pretty URLs, bundling and minification of CSS and JavaScript and lossless image compressions.
With our new domain alias feature, you can easily point several domains or subdomain to the same site.
Sometimes you have more than one domain that needs to resolve to the same website. Most other static hosts can only handle 1 domain per website, but with Netlify‘s new domain alias feature, you can easily point several domains or subdomains to the same site.
Our flexible rewrite rules also means you can even handle different subdomains as folders within the same site.
Hi there.
Hope you are having a great week.
We’ve got lot’s of big news, so we will get right to it!
If you’re using a single page app for a site that’s not behind a login, SEO is an important concern. Pre-rendering is the answer, and Netlify has supported external prerendering services like prerender.io for a while.
Now we’re proud to announce that Netlify has this feature built-in!
Today, we’re going to look at how to host a project built with Jekyll on Netlify, including setting up continuous deployment.
Let’s start from scratch. If you already have a Jekyll site set up, you can skip straight to the Connecting to Netlify section.
We just made Netlify’s redirect engine smarter.
Now redirect rules that would lead to a chain of subsequent redirects will always be flattened into one efficient redirect rule.
Today, we’re going to look at how to host a website built with Hexo on Netlify, including setting up continuous deployment.
Let’s start from scratch. If you already have a Hero site set up, you can skip straight to the Connecting to Netlify section.
Today, we’re going to look at how to host a website built with Brunch on Netlify, including setting up continuous deployment.
Let’s start from scratch. If you already have a Brunch site set up, you can skip straight to the Connecting to Netlify section.
Today, we’re going to look at how to host a website built with Roots on Netlify, including setting up continuous deployment.
Let’s start from scratch. If you already have a Roots site set up, you can skip straight to the Connecting to Netlify section.
Hi Everyone
Hope you’re having a great week.
We’ll get right to it.
As one of the very first CDNs to roll this out to all clients Netlify CDN now supports HTTP 2.0 out of the box!! HTTP2 is enabled for all sites using HTTPS.
At Netlify we have a multi layered CDN strategy: all assets, JavaScript, images, CSS, font files, etc., we serve out of Akamais CDN.
Today, we’re going to look at how to host a website built with Pelican on Netlify, including setting up continuous deployment.
Let’s start from scratch. If you already have a Pelican site set up, you can skip straight to the Preparing for deployment or Connecting to Netlify sections.
Today, let’s take a look at how to host a static website built with Hugo on Netlify, including setting up continuous deployment.
To get started, make sure you have all the tools you need. Visit gethugo.io to download and install Hugo.
If you already have a Hugo site set up, you can skip straight to the Connecting to Netlify section.
Today, let’s take a look at how to host Middleman on Netlify, including setting up continuous deployment.
Let’s start from scratch. If you already have a Middleman site set up, you can skip straight to the Connecting to Netlify section.
Hi Everyone!
Hope you’re having a great week.
We’re super stoked to present brand new plans and prices!
Up until now our continuous deployment services have been available as a separate service.
But CD is an integral part of what Netlify is. Just as much as our speed, multilayered CDN and instant cache invalidation is. As such it doesn’t make a lot of sense to separate it into it’s own service.
So with the free plan you now get 50 builds / site, and of course many more with paid plans.
We also integrated the different support plans into the main packages.
So instead of having 3x3 plans, we now have just 4 plans in total.
We will be back next week, with big CDN news. We promise.
Till then, keep smiling and have an awesome day.
/Chris & Matt
Continuous Deployment is one of the key features that sets Netlify apart.
With all other hosting services you need to build this yourself or pay for and install 3rd party software.
What is it?
Basically it means that we build, configure and deploy your site every time you push to git (be it a self-hosted repo, GitLabs, Bitbucket or of course GitHub). So you don’t have to do anything manually.
A sidenote: Many people confuse Continuous Deployment with Continuous Integration. So just to clarify, the latter refers to making merges in your repository and to running a test server that makes sure an automatic test is run every time you update that repository.
“There are only two hard problems in Computer Science: Cache Invalidation and naming things.” – Phil Karlton
While we’d rate our ability to name things to be fairly average, Instant Cache Invalidation is definitely part of Netlify’s rocketjuice.
Here is a bit about what it actually means, and why it’s important.
See what I did there?..
Hi Everyone
Welcome to our fourth newsletter.
Hope you’ve all been enjoying summer. We’ve been keeping real busy.
Lot’s of stuff going on. Working on our CMS. It will support all (!!) static site generators, no matter what programming language they’re written in. We can’t wait to open-source it!
Our hosting service had tons of work done under the hood as well.
Here is a selection of what’s new!
Charles is a co-founder and lead engineer at Snipcart, a solution empowering developers to turn any website into a customizable e-commerce platform. He likes code, scotch, and colourful socks. You can follow him on Twitter.
The popularity of developer-oriented flat-file CMS and static site generators has been rocketing for the last two or three years. A growing, dynamic (see what I did there?) community of developers is embracing the static movement. And they’ve got good reasons to do so. Static sites are faster, cheaper and safer than their dynamic counterparts.
The upper hand dynamic sites used to have was mostly due to their heavy feature-set. Back in the days, static sites couldn’t offer many dynamic features and useful add-ons. But those days are gone. Using the right widgets and plugins, developers can now create amazing web experiences with static sites today. And that’s exactly what we’ll prove in this post.
Jekyll Srcset is a small plugin for Jekyll that may solve your most important responsive image needs, without making things ridiculously complicated.
Here’s how you would use it in a Liquid template:
There are those who describe Netlify as “GitHub Pages on Steroids”. If that’s the case then Hugo on Netlify must be digging into Lance Armstrong’s stash.
Starting today you can easily run Hugo based builds with Netlify. Use hugo as your build command to run the latest version of Hugo, or use hugo_0.14 to run your build with a specific version of Hugo.
Hi everyone
Summer is here (or should be) and we’re celebrating that with a quick recap of what’s new at Netlify, the premium hosting service for modern static websites.
Form handling
First of all we’ve added built-in form handling as you may have known it from Bitballoon.
Just add a “netlify” attribute to any HTML form and we’ll start processing it. You can setup email, slack or webhook notifications from the admin panel!
Twickr is a small tool we’re using @netlify to get tweets of interest delivered to our Slack.
For us Slack has turned into a sort of command center, where we process support requests, discuss features, share drafts of mails or blog posts, get operational status messages and alerts.
Like most other startups we have a few stored twitter searches we tend to run all the time, to keep up with all that’s going on in our field. Terms like “Netlify” and ”static generators”, etc..
So we thought it would be nice if we could just get new notifications in Slack whenever someone tweets with such terms.
Woohoo! We’ve launched Netlify.com and are now live, both with hosting of static sites and apps (as you knew it from bitballoon.com) and our continuous deployment service.
We want to thank our beta-testers for all their help!
And thanks so much to everyone who has already signed on. We are getting raving feedback, and are really excited to see our work put to such good use as well. It sure seems like we’re on to something :)
How do Amazon S3 and Netlify compare as static site hosting platforms
Today pretty much every front-end developer is familiar with Amazon’s amazing Simple Storage Service, or S3. Some use it for hosting their front-end projects, so I thought I would take the opportunity to do a proper writeup about the differences between Netlify’s static hosting service and S3.
In short: S3 manages files. Netlify manages sites.
For information on how to setup SSL / HTTPS on Netlify, please click here
“Does HTTPS really make any sense for a static web site?”
We’ve heard this a couple of times when talking about Netlify’s HTTPS support.
It might seem like a static site is already plenty secure: there’s no moving parts, no risk of SQL injection, no openings for XSS attacks, no cookies to hijack, no personalized data sent over the wire, etc, etc, etc…
So why spend extra and take even the smallest performance hit just to add HTTPS to a static site?
Here are 5 good reasons you should switch to HTTPS for your static site today:
