Maybe - and Hopefully - More News Sites Will Go "Static" (More New Material Published But Established Pages Served Directly From the File System)
Go minimalist or go offline (drowning in one's complexity of choice)
THE WEB is quickly becoming pure trash. But there's a counter-current and it's getting stronger the trashier and wronger the Web gets. Many people are tired of the bloat, the slop, the spying, and the ads. They try to make a better Web and they create alternatives.
So despite the Web (as we once knew it) ebbing away because people are toiling away at "apps" or 'Webapps' (proprietary software disguised as Web pages because there's a Web address) there's still some portion out there on the Web that keeps it simple, K.I.S.S. Sites that have "evolved" (devolved rather) to become heavy and inaccessible will lose many readers; those readers will go elsewhere. A lot of "modern" sites no longer have RSS/Atom feeds; instead they told readers stupid things like, "follow us in Twitter" (which no longer exists!) and now they suffer.
There is still a portion of the Web that is fast and light. It literally takes less than a second to load the page requested, even if you never visited or requested a page from that same site before. We strive to be among those sites. This is why years ago we made our own 'CMS' (SSG rather) using Perl.
I recently spoke to an editor who expressed pride in that. They have a lightweight site and he said "we do have a tech team that cares a lot about that..."
Loading pages in his site takes under a second "and also the whole thing is powered by our own code in Perl (not an off-the-shelf CMS)," he said. "I can't stand that crap when you get a billion popups or ads in the way..."
I told him that bloated sites die faster (they've long used some proprietary CMS with licences) and that "we use Perl also [...] we built our own system [...] we try to teach others to do the same [as] the technical debt is lowered"; on Perl, he said, "we just found it perfect for wrangling text".
Keeping things simple and light is important for the sake of scaling. Caching has its limits, especially for very large sites or sites where arguments can be passed (e.g. search query). Techrights has about 50,000 "articles" (pages/posts, maybe even 90,000+), yet most sites it has linked to since 2006 are altogether offline now. They died in a maze of CMS clutter.
Sites that still use Drupal or WordPress or some arcane proprietary thing would be wise to migrate to something static. The sooner, the better (and cheaper). █
