Re: [Chicken-users] Homepage design proposal

[Matt Gushee]

Hi, Bahman--

On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 8:47 AM, Bahman Movaqar <address@hidden> wrote:
> I strongly disagree with using CHICKEN for the website. Let's keep things
> simple by using the right tool for the job.

I'd like to challenge that statement. As a (trying-to-be-professional)
web developer who has developed a template processor and a blogging
engine in Chicken Scheme, I view the question like this:

* There are a lot of good tools for web development in Chicken.

* They are mostly not very user-friendly - if you define "user" as a
web developer who does not know Scheme, or knows only a little Scheme

  - My Civet project (and its IMHO rather good documentation) is in
part an attempt to address that issue

* The various tools available don't appear to represent a *coherent
approach* to web development

In view of the above, I would argue that Chicken is indeed not a great
tool for web development in general (which is why I don't offer
Chicken solutions to clients at present). But the ingredients are
there, and may be good enough for the Chicken community to use for its
own website. And doing that might help the community to understand
better what is needed to make Chicken competitive in the webdev
sphere.

> These days there are some good static website generators out there, like
> JBake and Jekyll, with which one can use HTML or asciidoc or Markdown to
> generate a static website.

There is not a specific package for this, but I've done it using civet
and the markdown egg. Not difficult.

> Hosting these kind of websites is extremely
> cheap: they only need HTML (no PHP or .NET or anything). And they are very
> fast. The website content can be version'ed on a git repository and
> regenerated and copied to the web-server upon a git push.

+1 for version control.

And I agree that static pages are a good idea whenever there is not
heavy interactivity or very frequent updates. However, there is the
egg repo to consider.

And regarding the expenses - I don't know what you consider "extremely
cheap," but cloud VPSs are quite affordable these days, and permit you
to build your site any way you want. Digital Ocean starts at $5/month,
the very-well-regarded Linode, I think, starts at $10; I'm using
GreenQloud, which starts at about $7.80/month. The most basic VPS
might or might not be adequate for call-cc.org; I can say that I've
had a Chicken-based dynamic website (albeit a small and unpopular one)
running for around 2 years, and it is very light on resources (and
never goes down).

It doesn't matter that much to me - just saying that "eating our own
dog food" should be considered.

--
Matt Gushee