It's pretty sad how there doesn't seem to be any decent free options for websites which are easy to use. Squarespace and such cost a fortune which isn't worth it if you aren't trying to run a full ecommerce site. Plenty of services offer free hosting of static content but don't have any way a normal person can use them. Having to use a static site generator is too hard for non programmers.
I'm just surprised we haven't seem some app that can act like a wordpress admin page but generating a static output you can host for free or very cheap somewhere.
Squarespace is like $20/mo for a basic site promoting your Brick and Mortar business. That includes domain, hosting, and a template/CMS. It's not that pricey.
It's not pricey if you are a serious business making good money. It's a huge price if you are say a part time artist just wanting somewhere to store a price list, gallery and contact form.
I'm just surprised there is nothing that fills the gap between github pages and a full hosted solution with a ton of junk you don't need. All it really needs is maybe a locally running app that can handle generating the static pages and uploading them for you.
The barrier to create a website using Astro + a Template + telling an LLM like Gemini what you want is very low nowadays. So still, if you work with code some technical knowledge is required, but it will only get easier, probably.
There is very little chance a non developer would make it through that. The current options are Instagram/Facebook page which is free and easy. Or a website which is either expensive or requires you to be a developer.
A webapp or gui WYSIWYG static generator with basic git support abstracted away would go far for many. Just let it push to some private repo which cloudflare pages or similar would deploy off of.
It really feels like the only part of a non-static site most want is an editor. I absolutely loathe the matter but I do see why some restaurants only maintain a facebook page for their online presence.
This is what Netlify does. Hook up a private repo and deploy. Make a commit and it auto builds and you have a CI/CD pipeline. This is what I build all of my static sites with. You can do almost any JS framework like React, Angular, Vue, etc.
Netlify does way more than this, but it makes hosting static stuff super easy.
Google Sites exists. Buy a domain, point it at a free Google site. So easy a religion major can make a site that looks pretty decent (ha ha, only serious; I thought he'd used Wordpress at first) for just the cost of domain registration.
> I'm just surprised we haven't seem some app that can act like a wordpress admin page but generating a static output you can host for free or very cheap somewhere.
That’s what I’ve been working on for the last few years: https://palacms.com (MIT)
Not ready to announce the V3 RC yet (need to fill out the starter sites) but it’s working well if you wanna give it a spin - runs & deploys on Railway’s free tier.
This is exactly what we're trying to build with https://github.com/accretional/statue - you can email me or hit me up on Linkedin to get early access to our free static site hosting (which our new site for the project at https://statue.dev runs on, and which will Soon™ have a public-facing product doing exactly what you just asked for)
Basically you'll be able to edit the markdown for your site in a souped up version of our lightly reskinned vscode IDE at https://brilliant.mplode.dev and instantly publish/preview the changes in the same browser tab in a pane. Brilliant comes with a full Linux environment running in a container on our cloud platform, and building a Statue static site is already a one-command operation. The little UI we're working on let's nontechnical people skip that and just edit files and click buttons to make changes and publish it, though.
Here's a one-liner that will get you an entire static site with content (not the landing page yet, though) you can edit via markdown:
Honestly, there are some easier ways out there now, although of course no solution is perfect.
For non-technical people I'd recommend the Hostinger Website Builder, Obsidian Quartz or Astro Starlight.
Although as a front-end dev I'd choose building a custom page with Astro, which has now become much easier though with good templates available + LLM assistance.
No one should need JS to see the soups when that could be handled perfectly fine with CSS. I wish restaurants would just make their homepage a PDF of the menu.
No one should need an entire PostScript interpreter to see the soup of the day, either. A restaurant menu is text and images. HTML and CSS are perfect for text and images.
I bet that's part of the reason why microcontrollers, embedded programming, and retro computing are all popular hobbies these days. A return to a simpler time, when programs are compiled to a few kilobytes and run as fast as the hardware allows. Graphics? Unicode? Who needs 'em, just a stream of ASCII and integers for me thanks.
I agree with no JS, but why PDF over HTML? Hard-wrapping for letter-sized paper (ok, a PDF doesn't need to be letter-sized, but most menus are approximately that) with crapshoot reflow options for soft-wrapping in certain viewer apps is pretty dicey on a phone, mitigated only slightly by rotating the phone sideways.
The only benefit I can think of is if it leads to more frequent updates by the restaurant, due to limited skillset.
If the restaurant doesn't have anything besides a menu, /index.pdf is fine—no web design required; reuse the menu they're printing anyway.
The trade-off is that they'll have to pinch/zoom if they have a small display. It's a minor inconvenience to make the exact information they want available instantly.
index.pdf won't tend to play nicely with screen readers and also sucks for people on crappy mobile networks, so it's a minor inconvenience for some, and straight up unusable for others
> index.pdf won't tend to play nicely with screen readers
The horrible Wix sites most restaurants end up using are likely less accessible than a PDF. The Adobe PDF reader can reflow text.
> also sucks for people on crappy mobile networks
The average wysiwyg site builder produces bundles that are an order of magnitude larger than a PDF menu. Also, the PDF is easier to cache correctly and can be easily saved for offline access.
I vastly prefer looking at a PDF menu over an HTML one nearly all the time. PDFs are usually nicely formatted, and I don’t mind zooming and panning to see everything. HTML is frequently terribly formatted, interspersed with ads, slow, etc
In theory, yes, but the parent comment is talking about what they've frequently encountered in practice. Maybe there's reason to expect that having a lot more PDFs of menus might not result in a similar experience, but it doesn't seem obvious to me at least
The complexity between the modern web and a pdf is marginal. PDFs do get printed for menus. Editing a PDF and uploading it to the site, integrating prices and syncing between the site, online ordering, PDF menus is just part of the business. There are lots of platforms that help with this such as Slice.
Translating anything that renders on my screen is the same two clicks to open an LLM with the screen contents. I expect that will become an increasingly universal experience as LLM features get shoved into every nook and cranny of tech.
There's been a translate button for years which hooks deep into every nook and cranny of the website's HTML. It works great, it's built in and many restaurants even advertise it for tourists, because it's a zero-effort translation of their existing menu. Plus, it's low-data when you're inside a 1-bar basement restaurant.
Using an LLM to translate the visible part of a PDF on a mobile... seems like the worst possible solution to the problem.
Translating PDFs is more complicated than that because the strcture of a PDF document doesn't lend itself well to this kind of thing.
For example: if there's a dish name with a 2 line description below it and some allergy symbols below that, in HTML you can imagine the document structure that produces that. In PDF terms that might be 4 separate objects and, in particular, the eyes can see the two lines are adjacent so they fit together but the document structure doesn't really represent it taht way, necessarily.
This might also not work with translation because the lines are set for the size of the text they contain. Same for resizing the font.
Put another waay, PDF should be viewed as a typeset and layout format, not a document format.
I think you're misunderstanding what I'm describing. It's getting a screenshot of the visible portion of the rendered document, not the document itself with all the tags and nastiness inside. The same feature works with a photo of handwritten text, where obviously no digital document exists. It's not perfect, but usually adequate for menu translation.
No, the comment correctly points out that the "Soup" button (and all of its siblings... the food categories) is inoperable when JavaScript is disabled. You're stuck with "All" instead of nice filtering. There are ways to achieve this without JavaScript.
All of my static sites that I've built lately have been done on Netlify. Super easy to hook up to Github and the form handling is a breeze. I've known Mathias going back to when he was personally answering emails and promoting JAMSTACK so you can say I'm a bit biased. lol
Netlify is a great company that I'll always support.
What an exhausting solution to a made-up problem. This is exactly the kind of functionality JS was made to provide. There's a lot more JS in the PDF.js renderer modern browsers, and if you're not using a modern browser it likely wouldn't render at all. As others have pointed out, you're asking restaurants to throw away mobile traffic, screen readers, anyone not on a mainstream desktop browser to save ~20 lines of code in a programming language you don't like.
I wish restaurants would just make a homepage with menu _and_ opening hours.
In my area most restaurants have no website.
If they have a website it's often very hard to find their opening hours.
Under 'contact'? Nope!
At the footer? Nay!
Maybe somewhere hidden in the menu PDF? With luck...
Outside their homepage at google maps? Maybe.
On their Tripadvisor page? Hahaha! Funny! Not.
PDF is an enormous pain in the tits to view on a phone and has significant accessibility issues for people using assistive technologies.
It's not even about blind people. People with ADHD or dyslexia use assistive technology, which frequently makes an absolute horlicks of interpreting PDF. It's one of the reasons I'm trying to move a lot of documentation at work away from PDF and onto just straight HTML.
Plain old HTML, with thin CSS on it to make it not be black-and-white Times New Roman. Kicking it oldschool.
From a business perspective you can go further: the people who are browsing the internet without JS are people who are going to cost you more to support than they'll ever bring you in revenue. Just like trying to support Linux gamers, excluding them is a net positive.
I'm not seeing anything very specific in the code - feels like this could be just another Jekyll theme and still work the same. There's some custom front-matter in markdown files, but change that to regular YAML and it will just work.
There is some code for looking up the geo lat/log of locations at compile. not sure how you would do that. But yeah outside of that your are mostly correct.
I used elixir because thats what I know and love so it was mostly just a personal choice rather than a technical one.
First, the site generator is MIT licensed but I don't see a link to the license. If someone forks this generator, would they be in compliance with MIT license requirements?
Second, the images linked in this site are quite nice. I can imagine someone choosing to use some of them as is. Are they yours to share?
Third, it appears that you are targeting non-developers. I would think about how to make it as easy as possible to customize. Decisions like putting images in "priv/output/images" seems a bit confusing.
Third: Yeah that's the challenge I'm working on at the moment.
Thanks for the feed back.
I do plan on cleaning up the repo so that you are not starting with the example and also plan on making a small tutorial video to show how much effort it takes to setup.
I'm just surprised we haven't seem some app that can act like a wordpress admin page but generating a static output you can host for free or very cheap somewhere.
I'm just surprised there is nothing that fills the gap between github pages and a full hosted solution with a ton of junk you don't need. All it really needs is maybe a locally running app that can handle generating the static pages and uploading them for you.
These days you can buy paid software to do this:
- $110 https://blocsapp.com
- $90 https://realmacsoftware.com/rapidweaver-classic/
- $80 https://sitely.app
- $30 https://bootstrapstudio.io
- $0 https://www.silex.me
- $0 https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/
- $0 until recently, https://web.archive.org/web/20240410200646/https://grapesjs....
RapidWeaver Classic calls itself a subscription and sets up autopay, but you can immediately cancel and keep that version forever, like Jetbrains.
I'm a developer (so I prefer Astro and all) but was thinking of the barrier of entry for creating new websites is very low now.
It's a lot.
It really feels like the only part of a non-static site most want is an editor. I absolutely loathe the matter but I do see why some restaurants only maintain a facebook page for their online presence.
Netlify does way more than this, but it makes hosting static stuff super easy.
https://www.netlify.com/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44391535
(I'm not affiliated with it)
Basically you'll be able to edit the markdown for your site in a souped up version of our lightly reskinned vscode IDE at https://brilliant.mplode.dev and instantly publish/preview the changes in the same browser tab in a pane. Brilliant comes with a full Linux environment running in a container on our cloud platform, and building a Statue static site is already a one-command operation. The little UI we're working on let's nontechnical people skip that and just edit files and click buttons to make changes and publish it, though.
Here's a one-liner that will get you an entire static site with content (not the landing page yet, though) you can edit via markdown:
yes | npx sv create . --template minimal --types ts --no-add-ons --install npm && npm install statue-ssg && npx statue init && npm install && npm run dev
For non-technical people I'd recommend the Hostinger Website Builder, Obsidian Quartz or Astro Starlight.
Although as a front-end dev I'd choose building a custom page with Astro, which has now become much easier though with good templates available + LLM assistance.
I wrote a comparison of less-technical ways to build a website here with more details: https://webdev.bryanhogan.com/start/ways-to-build/
NextJS + Git + Vercel.
haven't used it, but looks like a great idea!
The only benefit I can think of is if it leads to more frequent updates by the restaurant, due to limited skillset.
The trade-off is that they'll have to pinch/zoom if they have a small display. It's a minor inconvenience to make the exact information they want available instantly.
The horrible Wix sites most restaurants end up using are likely less accessible than a PDF. The Adobe PDF reader can reflow text.
> also sucks for people on crappy mobile networks
The average wysiwyg site builder produces bundles that are an order of magnitude larger than a PDF menu. Also, the PDF is easier to cache correctly and can be easily saved for offline access.
Curious, I haven't tried it.
You can put ads into terribly formatted PDFs too
Using an LLM to translate the visible part of a PDF on a mobile... seems like the worst possible solution to the problem.
For example: if there's a dish name with a 2 line description below it and some allergy symbols below that, in HTML you can imagine the document structure that produces that. In PDF terms that might be 4 separate objects and, in particular, the eyes can see the two lines are adjacent so they fit together but the document structure doesn't really represent it taht way, necessarily.
This might also not work with translation because the lines are set for the size of the text they contain. Same for resizing the font.
Put another waay, PDF should be viewed as a typeset and layout format, not a document format.
- https://astro.build/themes/details/astropie/
- https://astro.build/themes/details/astrorante/
- https://astro.build/themes/details/tastyyy-restaurant-websit...
Netlify is a great company that I'll always support.
In my area most restaurants have no website.
If they have a website it's often very hard to find their opening hours. Under 'contact'? Nope! At the footer? Nay! Maybe somewhere hidden in the menu PDF? With luck... Outside their homepage at google maps? Maybe. On their Tripadvisor page? Hahaha! Funny! Not.
It's not even about blind people. People with ADHD or dyslexia use assistive technology, which frequently makes an absolute horlicks of interpreting PDF. It's one of the reasons I'm trying to move a lot of documentation at work away from PDF and onto just straight HTML.
Plain old HTML, with thin CSS on it to make it not be black-and-white Times New Roman. Kicking it oldschool.
Wait for 2 more iOS redesigns and everyone will use assistive technology on Apple devices :)
Making a website's basic functionality work without JS isn't just for the random users who switch off their browser's JS runtime.
It's also for the people who have a random network dropout or slowdown on a random file (in this case a JS file).
Does that really apply when the javascript is only ~2kb?
That is what's happening any time you've seen a website that randomly decides to load without styles, or with a missing image.
The good thing is that it's very apparent when that happens and you can just reload the page.
But it's not immediately obvious when it happens with a JS file.
That's half the reason why you shouldn't re-implement css features in a js file. (the other half is performance)
> the javascript is only ~2kb?
It can be even 200Mb if it's not loaded properly and now a website doesn't even function.
Actually, nobody should need an XML parser to see the soups either.
/s
[0] https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=a%3alocalcafe.or...
I used elixir because thats what I know and love so it was mostly just a personal choice rather than a technical one.
First, the site generator is MIT licensed but I don't see a link to the license. If someone forks this generator, would they be in compliance with MIT license requirements?
Second, the images linked in this site are quite nice. I can imagine someone choosing to use some of them as is. Are they yours to share?
Third, it appears that you are targeting non-developers. I would think about how to make it as easy as possible to customize. Decisions like putting images in "priv/output/images" seems a bit confusing.
Second: pixabay
Third: Yeah that's the challenge I'm working on at the moment. Thanks for the feed back.
I do plan on cleaning up the repo so that you are not starting with the example and also plan on making a small tutorial video to show how much effort it takes to setup.