Wouldn't it be simpler to host a lightweight dynamic website?<p>Automatic commits to a git repo of a static website to make it reflect dynamic data reminds me of <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15272144" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15272144</a>
This is very interesting write up. Kudos for the author for completing it and showing the whole process. Nevertheless, coding skills were still necessary.<p>Right now I'm working on a tool to achieve such kind of automation of a website, but without code. Mostly without the glitch part from the post. Working on any kind of hosting, no matter what underlying technology - WordPress, GH pages, whatever. With interface similar to IFTTT where you connect 3rd party apps to a website to populate content - like in the example from the post - data from Instagram on the website. Or data from Slack bot on website (D&D example).
UX for this project is not an easy stuff. Also, we are thinking what services are most important to be on the platform at the very beginning. We would love to hear any kind of feedback. If you are interested find my email in my bio.
I'm fascinated how far we can take SaaS solutions to build something you would usually deploy on PaaS before (i.e. a CMS).<p>While a slightly unrelated question, I was wondering: is there a PaaS platform which really replaces AWS ec2 instance by flexibility/capabilities? EC2 has great ecosystem (RDS+Elastic Cache+S3) and great flexibility of just setting up some extras on the side (App specific cron jobs+Letsencrypt cron jobs). Is there an offering which could really provide all that without going onto IaaS (which is what ec2 is) level?
I have been using WordPress for my personal blog and such task is trivial in WordPress with built-in sharing feature. What's more you can have control over the source code when you host it on your own VPS. The free WordPress hosting by wordpress.com has the same functionality built-in.<p>What are some of the advantages of using this workflow involving multiple services/tools? I feel that this is too many dependencies to accompany a simple task.