What Is The Lowest Maintenance Website Imaginable?

Show Notes:
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Heya
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Full Transcript:
Ben:
Thanks to Starr, we are now linked on the Honeybadger site.

Josh:
Nice.

Starr:
Oh, yeah. It only took two years to do that.

Josh:
I saw that on the "about" page.

Ben:
What made me think about it, I'm just, I don't know, surfing the site for something. I'm like, "You know what? We should probably link to the podcast from our site."

Starr:
Yeah, thanks for opening that issue.

Josh:
I thought we had it in the footer or something. Was it not even in the footer?

Ben:
No.

Josh:
Oh, man. We're good at marketing.

Ben:
We are so good at marketing.

Starr:
Totally.

Ben:
That was a good thing, so thank you.

Starr:
No problem. It was good. It's nice to have a tiny, concrete task that I know I can do that doesn't fractally expand into just caverns of uncertainty.

Ben:
For reals.

Ben:
Well, speaking of caverns of uncertainty, I was helping a friend with their website, which is a very old, old website, and I can't even admit while recording what versions of various software it's using, because that's how old it is. But basically it needed to make a move, and I was like, "You know, the last time I touched this, which was two years ago or something, even then everything was crusty and old. There's no way we're going to find a new hosting provider that's supporting all this old stuff anymore." So, what to do? What to do? I was just like, "You know what? Let me just run Wget on the site and just mirror the whole site to static pages, and then dump it up somewhere behind Apache and just leave it at that."

Josh:
Nice.

Ben:
So, I sent that over to her. I'm like, "Here, you should try this. How about this?" So, we'll see. The problem is there's no search now and the contact form and stuff like that won't work. I'm like, "You know what? Just let it go. Just embrace the simplicity."

Starr:
Oh my god, yeah.

Josh:
That's so weird. That is so weird, because yesterday I literally did that with the Heya sales site that was in Rails. I literally saved, I did the "save as webpage" thing, and then edited the CSS paths and just dumped into a GitHub pages branch on the public repository, because we decided not to sell Heya anymore and release it as open source, so we didn't need this fancy Rails app that we were paying to demo it. So, sometimes just "save as webpage" and deploy is the way to go.

Starr:
When you mentioned a search, that reminded me of this client I used to have. It was a freelancing client, it's a Rails app, it's a very, very old original Rails still. I guess technically they're still my client. I never actually dropped them, because they would get in contact with me once every two years and have me do two hours of work, so I was just like, "Okay, whatever." It's mostly because I like them and I know that they're not going to find somebody who's going to do this for them, so I didn't want to leave them high and dry. But I built an export as PDF feature a long time ago for them, and it used, what was that headless browser? Was it Phantom?

Josh:
Yeah, Phantom.

Starr:
I used the headless browser to save as a PDF, or print as a PDF or whatever, and it was all in Heroku. Last year they got in touch with me and was like, "Hey, this PDF thing stopped working," and I'm just like, "Oh my god. Oh my god." Because I haven't touched this in I think it's been almost 10 years, this part of the app. I was just like, "You know, all browsers support print to PDF now. All operating systems, you just press "print" and then you do the PDF. You select "PDF" and it works." I remember trying to get them just to do that-

Josh:
That's a good fix.

Starr:
... the first time I built it, but Windows didn't have that feature. You had to have-

Ben:
Had to get a driver for that.

Starr:
Yeah, you had to have a special software. But this time I guess Windows added print to PDF, so it was okay.

Ben:
Nice.

Josh:
That's amazing. Did it use WK HTML to PDF? Or was it something else? I think I used that graphic-

Starr:
No, it was a headless browser that would output-

Josh:
You were doing it, okay.

Starr:
... to PDF. It was running on Heroku somehow. I don't know how I got it to run on Heroku.

Josh:
Ben remembers what I'm talking about.

Ben:
Yeah. Oh, man, that was painful.

Josh:
On Heroku even, I think. I remember specifically an issue with that where I think we were deploying it to Heroku and it had some PDF function like this, but we weren't paying for multiple dynos or something. The app was having these random failures where it would just not respond to requests, and it turns out that the reason was that it was being blocked by this PDF process in the background, and then it would just block the threads for connections to Unicorn or whatever server it was using, probably WebKit or something, or WEBrick. The solution to that problem was just to pay for hosting.

Starr:
So, you're saying this wasn't a high-availability, high-scalability setup?

Josh:
No. But I think it was for our client. They were extremely cheap. I was like, "You just need to put some money into this."

Starr:
That's a catch-22 with freelancing, because you can be working on a thing and just be like, "This is terrible. I would be embarrassed to show anybody this." But nobody's going to pay you to make it any better, so you're just not, because you've got to make a living.

Josh:
That's the phase of freelancing where you just need to eat.

Ben:
Yeah, that's a terrible phase. Much better when you can get to the point where you can be selective in your clients and pick ones that'll actually both pay you and pay for the things that you recommend they do.

Josh:
One of my last old, old, old clients recently switched their website, like you were talking about, Ben, and I do remember the software versions they were running until within the last couple years I think, they were running a Joomla! 1.0 site, which I think the last release of that was 2008 or something.

Ben:
This was also a Joomla! site.

Josh:
Yeah, it's got to be a Joomla! site if it was from the late aughts or whatever.

Ben:
Right.

Josh:
Good times. I don't know. It must have been hacked 75 different ways. Or I don't know how it wasn't, to be honest. But I advised them to move to Squarespace, which I was looking at for a personal project recently, because I was looking like, "Do I want to build a custom little HTML site or whatever?" I realized for SquareSpace it's $140 a year for just to deploy a basic website. For most small business, like clients that I started out with in the early 2000s or whatever, that job just shouldn't exist anymore. It's just Squarespace or the services like them. You get a decent website that is maintained, and it's an hour of a modern developer's time per year. It just doesn't make sense to roll it myself.

Starr:
It's a little bit sad because one of my favorite aspects of web development was always just getting some mock-up from a designer or getting a screen from a designer, and then you have to make it somehow work using 2009-era CSS. It sounds very masochistic, but once you get into it, it's just a very Zen-type thing, because it just is what it is. You're just moving pixels from one picture to another, one window to another on the computer. It's just, I don't know.

Josh:
That was kind of fun, yeah.

Ben:
I never got into that. That was always for me very frustrating, so I just farmed that out to chop shops would would-

Josh: