Static file hosting with active content

The combination of Hugo & Netlify to host my blog has turned out to make easy things easy, and hard things possible.

Static content – blog posts, docs – is a natural win. Set-it-and-forget-it. Once it’s up in the cloud, there is no bit rot.

But! It’s turned out to be a good way to host active apps too, like these…

What I did

In the case of Stack correlations, it’s calling the Stack API client-side. The hosted page entirely static and can be served from anywhere.

Similar for Jargon: I created an API endpoint on Google Cloud Engine (Go), and call it entirely client-side as well.

Despite being apps, they have the same chrome and styles as the rest of the site. I like that.

Proxying

There is a third option for keeping all your apps under one domain: Netlify offers proxying of paths to URLs.

So if I want the Jargon API above to “live” on clipperhouse.com, I could proxy the clipperhouse.com/jargon path to the jargon-demo.appspot.com host.

This might also work to rate-limit or cache your dynamic content.

–