Jay's Ideas
Here's the Github repository: github.com/jaybrunet/srvsite
I started on the original idea around 2007, because I was frustrated with the speed and complexity of WordPress. Originally this was a single HTML/Javscript file that rendered all the pages. The SPA (Single-Page Application) paradigm lasted a few years, until everyone realized it didn't scale well, and arguably it wasn't very SEO friendly. Still I wanted a simple website that rendered instantly without a database. Simplicity scales, complexity fails!
I never really wanted to be a database administrator, but as a WordPress system admin, that's just part of the job description now. With SRVsite there's no database to install, or import, or export, and no InnoDB RAM to allocate. It's just easier to manage year after year.
Still hooked on the basic idea, I started over again using Node. But by 2020 I found the event-driven nature of Javascript was too unpredictable and clumsy. Eventually I started using Go, a straightforward language that runs everything in order sequentially. SRVsite was born, the software underlying the SRVpress website.
The beauty of Go, it uses very little memory compared to PHP, you don't need many dependencies, and there are few moving parts compared to the old WordPress LEMP stack. Working with WordPress intimately for decades professionally as a blogger, as a web developer, and as a system admin, the pain is always in the complexity, especially when it comes to migrations. Nobody likes migrations, except maybe sales people!
Recently, FrankenPHP (also written in Go) reduced the stack complexity for WordPress admins, completely eliminating the need for PHP-FPM. Yet the WordPress codebase is still enormous, unwieldy and difficult to build on. My original plan was to have SRVsite run without Nginx, simplifying installation further. But now I prefer using Caddy because it handles https certificate renewals automatically. If you need help configuring Caddy or would like me to setup your SRVsite server, let me know.
The way I designed SRVsite, you can easily edit pages "in production" without rebuilding or recompiling anything. See changes instantly. If you want, you can use a separate development environment and just upload your .srv files when you're ready to deploy them, but it's not a necessity.
In my professional opinion, this is better than "static website" generators that require an extra "build" step, and then you struggle with navigation. With SRVsite, basic navigation is automatic. The way I see it, static pages are a big step backwards. Let's move forward. SRVsite is the best of both worlds, you get the simplicity and speed of static pages, with the intelligence and extensibility of a modern programming language.
And now that we have AI, SRVsite is even more attractive. Because the codebase is so tiny, AI agents can digest it in seconds and create just about anything you want. Building upon a smaller foundation is generally smarter (fewer tokens) than refactoring a huge application like WordPress, which is prone to break and burn through all your inference tokens. Let me know if you use SRVsite as a foundation for building websites with AI!
