Personal homepage of Chris Smith https://chameth.com/favicon.png 2025-10-28T00:00:00Z https://chameth.com/ Chris Smith 2025-10-28T00:00:00Z https://chameth.com/moving-back-to-a-dynamic-website/ <p>For the past few weeks I’ve been working on converting chameth.com from a static site into a dynamically generated site backed by a database. This is the exact opposite process to one I went through maybe a decade ago. So why the change, and what’s different?</p> <p>I’d actually been toying with the idea of switching for a while. Every now and then I’d have a thought along the lines of “it would be nice if I could add X to my website… but how would that work with static site generation?”. Comments, private drafts, dynamic themes based on the date, and many more little bits and pieces. You can definitely <em>do</em> them with a static site generator, but it felt like going against the grain. The beauty of a static site is that it’s… well… static. Shoehorning in dynamic features takes away a lot of the benefits, or leads to having lots of weird seams where you join the static and dynamic pieces together.</p> <p>A bunch of things have changed since I originally switched to a static site generator. In no particular order:</p> <ul> <li>The advent of containers, and managing them with config like in <code>docker-compose</code>, means standing up and managing a database for the site is trivial.</li> <li>I’ve learnt and really like Golang, which makes writing HTTP-based servers a breeze, and makes it easy to deploy the site as a single binary (in a container).</li> <li>LLM agents are good enough that I can have it do all the boring CRUD work needed to actually make a dynamic site work (<em>so</em> many admin functions…).</li> </ul> <p><a href="https://github.com/csmith/chameth.com/">The code</a> is open source if you’re interested. I’ve made no effort to make it generally useful outside of this website, but it might serve as a useful reference if you want to do something similar. Now that’s done, I can safely procrastinate on all those dynamic features I had planned!</p>