It turns out my new found fascination with decentralized websites isn’t specific to them being decentralized. The movement of static sites has a place on the current web too – JAMStack. For the past year people have been researching ways to take away the traditional centralized back end, and it’s pretty neat.
Just when I thought my publishing setup was finalized, I stumbled across Forestry. Forestry appears to solve my GUI wishlist all at once. GUI for Hugo? Check. Well designed for clients? Check. Can be mapped to my URL? Check. Well supported and documented? Check.
The promising aspect of Beaker is that all web technologies work as expected. The fact that visting a site is as simple as creating an index.html and placing dat instead of http in front of the URL is a great start. The trickier aspect is teaching yourself to think in terms of a static, shared infrastructure instead of a central one. No database means that a static CMS is needed to manage the blog.
After reading Time to Rebuild the Web? and the accompanying Hacker News discussion, I felt compelled to jump in and give Beaker a shot. I was instantly excited. They type of excited where eight hours fly by and you don’t want to leave your computer. That said, I’m not sure if the appeal was from nostalgia or innovation.