I think it would be simple to use this tool in conjunction with S3/Cloudfront. I use Jekyll to build a local version of my site and then s3_website to push it to AWS. I like that the tool I use for building the site doesn’t tie me to a particular hosting strategy. (AFAICT the linked script only uses rsync to build the site locally in a target directory, not to deploy it to some remote host.)

+1 to Hugo, I’d say “pretty fast” is underselling how ridiculously fast it is (at least compared to other popular static site generators).

Re: why not S3+Cloudfront?

I started with this a while ago. The problem is you end up using something like Route53 to get your custom domain and TLS, which ultimately ends up costing you $2-3/mo per domain altogether, which adds up pretty quickly when you have a bunch of domains. Not to mention the ordeal of managing AWS and their massive dashboards and weird config syntax.

These days I use Github pages + Cloudflare for DNS/TLS in their free tier. If I were up for migrating again, I’d consider using Netlify which is great by all accounts and supports some basic dynamic forms that are handy for static sites (contact form, etc).

Why httpd? It’s only available for OpenBSD (and maybe other BSDs), and while I haven’t (yet) looked at the script, it would seem that it offeres no specific feature, which a more portable and lightweight server like darkhttpd would offer.

I think the author is an OpenBSD user, and is probably trying to do as much with the base system (which includes httpd) and a minimum of additional packages as possible. darkhttpd is an additional package, and doesn’t come with a man page.

Also if the “pps” value is important, consider using cmark, since it’s known for it’s speed, that is beside it being commonmark compliant.

cmark hasn’t been ported to OpenBSD yet. Granted, the author could probably build it from source or do their own port, but that would defeat the point of the exercise.

The author mentions to use OpenBSD for servers and workstations, so why not? Portability isn’t so important for personal tools. And httpd is only used for the local preview feature and could easily replaced by any other http server, including python -m http.server. The 6 line httpd config is already included in the <160 lines of shell scripts.

The script is very short, reading such a thing before commenting generally improves sites like lobste,rs ;)

Being written by the OpenBSD team implies a certain amount of simplicity, correctness, security, and documentation. Ive never heard of darkhttpd. If those are only choices, I’d default on OpenBSD’s implementation unless I had good reason to do otherwise.

I’m starting to think I want a browser that stores my complete history (without videos or the like). I’m already downloading every page I visit, and the storage requirements for text are tiny by modern standards. All too often I want to cite or link to some page, months or years later, only to discover that it’s gone.

I’d love to keep copies of code I wrote for former employers, but in the current legal environment, I’m afraid to. If I go back to some of that code to remind myself of how I solved a particular problem once, and then I solve a similar problem in a similar way for my current employer, am I opening myself (or even my current employer) up to a lawsuit? Or, worse, a criminal charge of some kind? Sergey Aleynikov went to jail for doing pretty much exactly this on some bullshit trade secrets charge.

What you say makes sense, but it also ignores the larger issue — so, you do save all your work locally, but how exactly do you save (and present) the proof that it’s been published? Being published online also means that the work has generated some comments; if you’re doing work-for-hire as in the original article, you can’t exactly own the comments and all the jazz, too, right?

This is also one of the issues with the closed-source software — outside of the org it’s written in, you most likely have no proof that you ever wrote any of that (well, outside of the being familiar with it, and making some seemingly intelligent discussions about it, with a future interviewer etc). Sadly, since most people take close-source for granted, in my experience I’ve found that it seems like having the actual proof and source-code being available online is actually the outlier, and is deemed kind of weird, without getting much extra points. (Although, to their credit, some progressive open-source-related companies do require published source code right in their job descriptions nowadays.)

BTW, I found this link on DragonFly digest, but a couple of days ago I have also witnessed another shutdown by AOL, noticed through DMOZ’s OpenBSD/Companies — www.aolserver.com/, which started redirecting directly to aol.com now. It has been marked as a redirect automatically, and now has been removed by an editor. (Which is kinda funny, because AOL actually owns DMOZ!)

Frankly, I don’t understand why companies shut these things down — don’t they realise that people will shortly remove links to these shutdown properties (e.g. aolserver.com is gone from dmoz now), it’ll expire from the search engines etc. No matter how stale the content is, it’s likely still generating at least some revenue, and hosting being as cheap as it is, I find it hard to believe that they’re loosing money on simply keeping stuff like that online, all at the same time that we hear the stories about cybersquatters being able to afford to register random domains just for the sake of showing ads to the misplaced users, having their whole business model made just around showing ads on random domains with no real content whatsoever!

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Today, yes. My understanding is that the fear is about creeping dependencies.