This year was the first time that I've moved away from websites based on Wordpress, PHP and MySQL to embrace the simplicity of static HTML sites.
Simplicity is indeed a good reason. It means virtually no exploits as there is no database nor script interpretation happening. It means speed since there are no PHP, Java nor Ruby scripts running on the server and only direct files are delivered. The last feature that I was curious to try is the site hosting provided by Github, which is only supporting static web sites.
The first site to convert was the TripleCheck company site. It had been developed over a year ago and lagged a serious update. Was based on Wordpress and wasn't easy to make changes on the theme or content. The site was quickly converted and placed online using Github.
However, not all are roses with static websites. As you can imagine, one of the troubles is updating the text and links that you want to see on each page of the site. There are tools such as Jekyll that help to maintain blogs, but all that was needed here was a simple tool that would pick the header and footer tags to updated with whatever content was intended.
Easy enough, I've wrote a simple app for this purpose. You can download the binaries from this link and the source code is available at https://github.com/triplecheck/site_update/
How to get started?
Place the site_update.jar file inside the folder where your web pages are located. Then copy also the html-header.txt and html-footer.txt files and write inside the content you'd want to use as header and footer.
Inside the HTML pages that you want to change, you need to include the following tags:
<header></header>
<footer></footer>
Once you have this ready, from the command line run the jar file using:
java -jar site_update.jar
Check your HTML pages to see if the changes were applied.
What happens when it is running?
It will look for all HTML files with .html extension that are found on the same folder where the .jar file is located. For each HTML file it will look for the HTML tags that were mentioned above and replace whatever is placed between them, effectively updating your pages as needed.
There is an added feature. If you have pages on a sub-folder, this software will automatically convert the links inside the tags so that they keep working. For example, a link pointing to index.html will be modified to ../index.html and this way preserve the link structure. This is done also for images.
An example where this program used can be found at the TripleCheck website, whose code you find available on Github at https://github.com/triplecheck/triplecheck.github.io
Feedback, new features?
I'd be happy to help. Just let me know on the comment box here or write a post on Github.
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