“Does HTTPS really make any sense for a static web site?”
We’ve heard this a couple of times when talking about BitBalloon’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’s 5 good reasons you should switch to HTTPS for your static site today:
Today we’re launching a new feature that lets you add fine grained access control through basic auth, and gives you control over all the HTTP headers for URLs within your site.
Mathias Biilmann, founder of BitBalloon, dives into details about the redesign of staticgen.com. Our listing of the top, open-source, static site generators.
He shares how he used Github’s API, Gist, Middleman and Factor.io to build an always up to date, dynamic listing as a static website hosted on BitBalloon.
Ever lost your local version of a website? Ever wish you had stored an earlier version after making a change?
From today you can download the source files for any version of your website you’ve ever hosted on BitBalloon.
Today we’re launching a new API feature that’ll give you a bit more control over the deployment process, by allowing you to mark a deploy as a draft.
Middleman is one of our favorite static site generators here at BitBalloon.
This site is built with Middleman and we recently launched StaticGen, a directory of open-source static site generators, powered by Middleman.
Our new middleman-bitballoon extension now makes it even easier to deploy Middleman built sites to BitBalloon.
Grunt has quickly become the standard build-tool for the front-end world, with a huge ecosystem with hundreds of plugins you can use to automate just about anything.
Today we’re adding one more to the list: grunt-bitballoon.
Ara T Howard, long time Rubyist and partner at the Boulder Colorado based web agency, Dojo4, explains why using a static site architecture unleashes the creative forces of the agency’s front end talent.
He shares how to use Draftin and Middleman to create a collaborative authoring environment that seamlessly publishes Markdown documents to rendered HTML on BitBalloon.
Most websites have a group of people involved in building, updating and maintaining them.
This is no different with static sites or one-page apps, and so far BitBalloon hasn’t been giving the ideal experience for a team working together or for a designer with a client.
If you’ve been doing websites for a while you’ve no doubt run into .htaccess files. It’s a common directory level configuration file supported by various webservers.
For historical reasons the format of .htaccess is the same as the Apache web server...
We recently ported the BitBalloon homepage to Middleman, a ruby based static site generator that’ll make you feel right at home if you’re used to Ruby on Rails development.
In this post you’ll see how we setup continuous deployment for our Middleman site with Codeship, a very affordable hosted continuous integration service.
As a bit of an X-mas gift to all of our users, we rolled out a whole new spam filter over the holidays.
Whenever you upload a site to BitBalloon we’ll find any HTML form on the page, and make it work by giving it a little submission database. This is extremely handy when you have a site with a typical contact form.
For small personal projects, you might want to do a new deploy whenever you do a git commit. BitBalloon’s command line tools make it easy to set this up.
A great part of the popularity of Jekyll no doubt comes from GitHub Page’s Jekyll integration. Every GitHub Page is run through Jekyll when you push content to your repository, so you get continuous deployments out of the box.
This comes with some limitations, however. There’s no way to use any Jekyll plugins (since GitHub is not setup to run untrusted ruby code during the deploys) and if you want any forms on your site, you’ll need to use a third-party service.
With BitBalloon and Travis-CI you can get the same continuous deployment process for your Jekyll site without these restrictions.
This morning’s inbox had an email from a potential reseller customer, asking how BitBalloon compares to Amazon S3. It’s not the first time we’ve gotten this question, so I decided to take the opportunity to do a proper writeup about the differences between BitBalloon and S3.
In short: S3 manages files. BitBalloon manages sites.
Whether you’re prototyping a site with the web inspector taking a screen-shot is often not enough. Wouldn’t it be great if you could take a code snapshot instead?
Introducing Forklet, a chrome extension that will clone whatever page you are viewing in Chrome and deploy it to BitBalloon. Forklet, doesn’t snapshot an entire site, just the page you are viewing.
Yesterday Paul Graham tweeted this little gem on static sites:
Static sites are the fixies of the Internet.
— Paul Graham (@paulg) November 17, 2013
Just as with fixies, part of the fascination with static sites is their simplicity, their light weight and the lack of maintenance.
There’s a more derogatory part to the analogy though, hinting that static sites are a short-lived fad — unpractical but appealing to cyber-hipsters until the next trend comes along.
As a founder of a hosting service for static websites, I obviously have a different view on this.
At BitBalloon we like to eat our own dog-food, so while our public website started out as just a part of our Rails application, we always wanted to build it as a static site and host it with BitBalloon.
When you have a somewhat complex site, you’ll quickly outgrow a bunch of HTML files, and that’s when a static site generator comes in handy. After looking at a whole bunch of them we settled on a node.js based generator called Punch.
If you’re building something web-based, you’ve probably heard about these things called APIs, maybe you’re even actively using them to achieve your goals.
APIs give you incredible leverage. The worlds most powerful algorithms in weather prediction or facial recognition are at your fingertips without any upfront capital investment on your part.
