Statix
static web site editor in your browser
For some reason, I have this trait that I'm always having five different side projects cooking up in my brain. Whether it's a GPT powered indie game I'm making just to prove myself I can make it, or I want to make or a brand new thing, starting my 34th new Laravel project, I always alternatively keep getting and losing interest into working on my existing project(s).
Statix Updates
That doesn't mean I wasn't working on Statix. These months I've been slowly but surely working on a back-office system where you can manage your websites.
Website and connection management 😎
As you'll be able to manage multiple websites with Statix, you need a place to overview all the websites you manage, create new and maybe even delete old websites:
Adding a new website is easy as filling out a form:
...and setting up a SFTP connection:
...or a Github connection?
Out of the box Statix will support 4 types of connections to your website file system: ftp(s), sftp, Github and AWS S3. In the future, I might expand these, but I think this is more than enough for the beginning.
Front-end editor 😵💫
I've been battling a huge battle with my browser in order to allow you, as the web site owner, to make changes directly on the website itself. Always tightening rules around including and running code from 3rd party web sites are slowly but surely strangling my desire to work on this. The battle is not over, though, and I've been working on alternatives. Like assigning each web site a subdomain on Statix, and then opening your web site pages from that subdomain with the editor loaded. We'll see where I'll go with that.
HTML5 DOM manipulation in PHP 🤯
Another issue for me is rather catastrophic support of the latest stable PHP (8.3 at the moment of writing this text) to parse and modify HTML5 DOM, which is a core functionality of Statix. I've been playing with several different HTML5 DOM manipulation libraries for PHP, and I'm yet to decide which one to stick with. Or maybe I'll work on other stuff (like the above-shown back-office which is, at the moment, just a series of unconnected blade templates) until PHP 8.4 is stable enough to take advantage of it's support for HTML5 DOM.
Conclusion
I'm slow, I know. But I have a bunch of ideas and I'm trying to make some of them work, Statix included. Besides that, I have a real life with a full time job and with real life problems. But know I will keep returning to work on Statix regularly. I hope I will also keep posting here as regularly as possible.
P.S. The GPT-powered game I linked above uses PuterJS, a cloud and AI JS library from the authors of puter.com (a web based browser operating system). Among other things, it supports GPT integration (like ChatGPT), but also cloud file hosting and actually web site hosting. I already have some ideas 🤔 maybe even connect it with Statix somehow 🤔🤔🤔
... to be able to update a couple of my static websites directly from within the browser.
Some ten-ish years ago I was developing and selling a "revolutionary" PHP CMS called Instant Update which was used to edit mostly-static php web pages directly on-pages (inline editing) if you were logged in into the said CMS.
I won't go into many details why it wasn't sustainable, but let's just say I didn't know how to sell software, and the PHP community moved towards writing more serious code with frameworks, so it wouldn't pay out to re-write everything in a modern framework.
As my family grew, I needed more stable source of income, so I abandoned the project and got a regular 9 to 5 job.
In the meantime I made a couple of static web sites myself, some hosted on Github pages, some on S3 buckets and some on my personal VPS. All of them share one thing - it takes multiple steps to update their content. Whether it's editing HTML and then pushing to Github or uploading files to S3, for me it's a cumbersome task which results in me never updating those web sites with fresh info.
Those sites are so simple and essentially - unimportant. Like for example my personal website - the world won't stop if my web site stops working. So I won't even bother maintaining something like Wordpress in order to have such sites hosted. I just create static HTML and forget about them. But wouldn't it be nice if there was a way to update those web pages as easy (or even easier than) in Wordpress?
Today, years later, I have more experience and I think I can make it work again, but in the cloud. You don't need to install anything. You don't even need PHP, you just need to provide a connection to your files and (optionally) include one JS file in your static HTML pages.
I already have a half-baked MVP. It turns my personal web site from this:
to this:
Sounds interesting? Do you have such fully static web sites that you rarely if ever update? Subscribe on https://statix.website or follow here if you want to keep up with the development! 🚀
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