Cost-Optimization

The best websites are home-cooked meals. Andrew’s Selkouutiset Archive was birthed after I realized there was no obvious way to fetch the previous articles of the “Easy Finnish” daily news broadcast. This annoyed me as a student of the language. “Here we have a stream”, I thought, “of high-quality, human-written, interesting practice material, and no easy way to access it!” So I went out of my way to create such a way, and me and my language skills have been profiting off of it ever since. A very small website, for a very specific need, just leaves a delightful aftertaste in the mouth. ...

Example from yesterday’s news. Count ’em yourself – there’s 76 of them there. Mass i18n efforts like this are I think an underappreciated benefit of what static site generators like Hugo can give you. Actually, especialy Hugo – it’s multi-language support is very good, like darn near everything about the platform once you get past the initial learning curve. Another underappreciated benefit: When building HTML pages is fast, you can afford to build a lot of them. A quick hugo && cd public/ && fd html | wc -l tells us that there are about 2700 HTML files on the site, which Hugo builds in under 3000 ms on my machine. The Github Action run which built the site as of today took a glacial 35 seconds by comparison. ...