Hacker News Reader

Wouldn’t it make more sense to generate the html and save it to the appropriate file from the blog generator itself?

What if you have a page that is there but it’s not linked from any other page (a landing page for example)? It would never be pre-rendered.

View on HN

You can definitely do that, but I find this appealing for development, just write some routes as you normally would and the templates all re-render etc, no need for watching file changes and re-compiling. But you're right, if you have a 404 template for example you have to `curl ... > build/404.html` which is a bit lame.

I did exactly this with a rails project once, called render_to_string on each page I was interested in and saved them as HTML files. The wget method is clever but I agree, working within the same system makes the most sense.

If you are using a web framework designed for dynamic processing - think something like Java servlets/JSP, or in the authors case Go - it's often non-trivial to find/implement a render_to_page function, let alone enumerate all possible pages.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com