Alex Lockhart

It is often assumed that static site generators have limitations that server side rendering or client side rendering is necessary to get beyond. Single page applications, progressive web apps, engaging and dynamic UI's, integrations with databases and content management systems; these cannot be used with a statically generated site can they? They certainly can. One of the names this technique goes by is JAMstack. While in my opinion a server sending prebuilt HTML to a browser should be the standard it has become necessary to give it a name as both the server side and browser side of web development has become cumbersome and overly complex.
However there are many things to consider when building a JAMstack website. How do you integrate content and databases? How do you enhance it with modern web development techniques such as SPA and PWA? We will take a look at some of these considerations and specifically how they apply to web content management.
Fine Tuned Build Hooks If your we…

The world wide web promised to allow anyone and everyone to distribute content to the world. In previous generations newspapers, magazines, radio, and television were the mediums of content distribution. This meant that the content we consumed was funneled through centralized authorities. The news, art, opinions, and stories that we read, heard, and watched had to come from one of these outlets.

The promise of the web was to break down this centralization and control by giving everyone access to distribute content. The centralized authorities that dominated content distribution of previous generations would come to an end and people would be free to connect and share with one another directly. Enter social media; the height of this promise of personal connection.

Users of social media platforms do not see themselves as content creators, but that is indeed what they are. They produce serialized stories and opinions, provide inspiration, and in many other ways produce content that othe…

The Contentful and Netlify combination has become a popular architecture for web development. This is for good reason as each of these have solved their respective problems in a powerful way. Contentful has made content easy to configure and produce. It is flexible enough to create a wide array of schemas and has easy to use API's no matter what platform on which you are developing. On the other side it has made this content easy to create with clean customizable interfaces.

Netlify has similarly solved the problem of web hosting in a powerful way with HTTPS by default, global CDN, and continuous integration. Combined with Github code hosting and Contentful connected build code this creates a powerful architecture to build apps and websites on.

As seen on Static Gen there are lots of options for producing the app that goes along with this infrastructure trio. While many of these options are great, one option that seemed to be missing was a static site generator that stayed as clo…

Many web technologies are solved problems. Some are overly solved problems. Others are overly engineered, solved problems. Content management is in a stage where there are many interesting tools being created without much consensus being reached. Creativity is fun but stressful. Consensus is boring but powerful.

I am on a continuous content management journey in my professional career, trying to find the best options for various use cases. Right now my personal content is distributed across Firebase, Contentful, and Blogger, delivered through various apps in a myriad of ways, all living under the alexlockhart.me domain. This complexity is intentional as I am always using my own personal content as a means of exploring web technologies.

At the moment I am looking for a free tier CMS that can support my own content needs in the long run and can be used to support small level clients while being capable of cheaply evolving into large scale solutions. Integrating Contentful with a custom…