Free static site generator for small restaurants and cafes
lite.localcafe.org71 points by fullstacking 5 hours ago
71 points by fullstacking 5 hours ago
No one should need JS to see the soups when that could be handled perfectly fine with CSS. I wish restaurants would just make their homepage a PDF of the menu.
No one should need an entire PostScript interpreter to see the soup of the day, either. A restaurant menu is text and images. HTML and CSS are perfect for text and images.
I agree with no JS, but why PDF over HTML? Hard-wrapping for letter-sized paper (ok, a PDF doesn't need to be letter-sized, but most menus are approximately that) with crapshoot reflow options for soft-wrapping in certain viewer apps is pretty dicey on a phone, mitigated only slightly by rotating the phone sideways.
The only benefit I can think of is if it leads to more frequent updates by the restaurant, due to limited skillset.
If the restaurant doesn't have anything besides a menu, /index.pdf is fine—no web design required; reuse the menu they're printing anyway.
The trade-off is that they'll have to pinch/zoom if they have a small display. It's a minor inconvenience to make the exact information they want available instantly.
The complexity between the modern web and a pdf is marginal. PDFs do get printed for menus. Editing a PDF and uploading it to the site, integrating prices and syncing between the site, online ordering, PDF menus is just part of the business. There are lots of platforms that help with this such as Slice.
PDF:s are not great on mobile. And you can’t easily translate them (I often translate restaurant menus when they are on a website with just 2 clicks)
Translating anything that renders on my screen is the same two clicks to open an LLM with the screen contents. I expect that will become an increasingly universal experience as LLM features get shoved into every nook and cranny of tech.
I agree. There are lots of free AstroJS themes for restaurants that generate static html that you can host somewhere like Firebase hosting for free.
- https://astro.build/themes/details/astropie/
- https://astro.build/themes/details/astrorante/
- https://astro.build/themes/details/tastyyy-restaurant-websit...
All of my static sites that I've built lately have been done on Netlify. Super easy to hook up to Github and the form handling is a breeze. I've known Mathias going back to when he was personally answering emails and promoting JAMSTACK so you can say I'm a bit biased. lol
Netlify is a great company that I'll always support.
I was going to recommend the same! Astro + Astro theme + an LLM will get you very far these days.
To be fair this project uses zero 3rd party npm modules for runtime. The total runtime JS it uses is 1.76kB in size.
PDF is an enormous pain in the tits to view on a phone and has significant accessibility issues for people using assistive technologies.
It's not even about blind people. People with ADHD or dyslexia use assistive technology, which frequently makes an absolute horlicks of interpreting PDF. It's one of the reasons I'm trying to move a lot of documentation at work away from PDF and onto just straight HTML.
Plain old HTML, with thin CSS on it to make it not be black-and-white Times New Roman. Kicking it oldschool.
No one is browsing the internet without JS today (within margin of error). Whether or not this "should" be the case, it is.
This is the wrong way of looking at it.
Making a website's basic functionality work without JS isn't just for the random users who switch off their browser's JS runtime.
It's also for the people who have a random network dropout or slowdown on a random file (in this case a JS file).
A PDF can't get the user halfway through the delivery process before seeing the soups.
Nobody should need a PDF renderer to see the soups.
Actually, nobody should need an XML parser to see the soups either.
It's pretty sad how there doesn't seem to be any decent free options for websites which are easy to use. Squarespace and such cost a fortune which isn't worth it if you aren't trying to run a full ecommerce site. Plenty of services offer free hosting of static content but don't have any way a normal person can use them. Having to use a static site generator is too hard for non programmers.
I'm just surprised we haven't seem some app that can act like a wordpress admin page but generating a static output you can host for free or very cheap somewhere.
This is exactly what we're trying to build with https://github.com/accretional/statue - you can email me or hit me up on Linkedin to get early access to our free static site hosting (which our new site for the project at https://statue.dev runs on, and which will Soon™ have a public-facing product doing exactly what you just asked for)
Basically you'll be able to edit the markdown for your site in a souped up version of our lightly reskinned vscode IDE at https://brilliant.mplode.dev and instantly publish/preview the changes in the same browser tab in a pane. Brilliant comes with a full Linux environment running in a container on our cloud platform, and building a Statue static site is already a one-command operation. The little UI we're working on let's nontechnical people skip that and just edit files and click buttons to make changes and publish it, though.
Here's a one-liner that will get you an entire static site with content (not the landing page yet, though) you can edit via markdown:
yes | npx sv create . --template minimal --types ts --no-add-ons --install npm && npm install statue-ssg && npx statue init && npm install && npm run dev
This isn't exactly the point. He said easy to use. Yours requires developer skills which is not what he is looking for.
Squarespace is like $20/mo for a basic site promoting your Brick and Mortar business. That includes domain, hosting, and a template/CMS. It's not that pricey.
It's not pricey if you are a serious business making good money. It's a huge price if you are say a part time artist just wanting somewhere to store a price list, gallery and contact form.
I'm just surprised there is nothing that fills the gap between github pages and a full hosted solution with a ton of junk you don't need. All it really needs is maybe a locally running app that can handle generating the static pages and uploading them for you.
Macs used to come with iWeb. https://www.apple.com/welcomescreen/ilife/iweb-3/
These days you can buy paid software to do this:
- $110 https://blocsapp.com
- $90 https://realmacsoftware.com/rapidweaver-classic/
- $80 https://sitely.app
- $30 https://bootstrapstudio.io
- $0 https://www.silex.me
- $0 https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/
- $0 until recently, https://web.archive.org/web/20240410200646/https://grapesjs....
RapidWeaver Classic calls itself a subscription and sets up autopay, but you can immediately cancel and keep that version forever, like Jetbrains.
The barrier to create a website using Astro + a Template + telling an LLM like Gemini what you want is very low nowadays. So still, if you work with code some technical knowledge is required, but it will only get easier, probably.
Honestly, there are some easier ways out there now, although of course no solution is perfect.
For non-technical people I'd recommend the Hostinger Website Builder, Obsidian Quartz or Astro Starlight.
Although as a front-end dev I'd choose building a custom page with Astro, which has now become much easier though with good templates available + LLM assistance.
I wrote a comparison of less-technical ways to build a website here with more details: https://webdev.bryanhogan.com/start/ways-to-build/
A webapp or gui WYSIWYG static generator with basic git support abstracted away would go far for many. Just let it push to some private repo which cloudflare pages or similar would deploy off of.
It really feels like the only part of a non-static site most want is an editor. I absolutely loathe the matter but I do see why some restaurants only maintain a facebook page for their online presence.
This is what Netlify does. Hook up a private repo and deploy. Make a commit and it auto builds and you have a CI/CD pipeline. This is what I build all of my static sites with. You can do almost any JS framework like React, Angular, Vue, etc.
Netlify does way more than this, but it makes hosting static stuff super easy.
Not exactly what you’re asking for, but this is nonetheless an interesting approach: https://getpublii.com/
> I'm just surprised we haven't seem some app that can act like a wordpress admin page but generating a static output you can host for free or very cheap somewhere.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44391535
(I'm not affiliated with it)
how about something like feather.so? publish a website / blog from your Notion...
haven't used it, but looks like a great idea!
I'm not seeing anything very specific in the code - feels like this could be just another Jekyll theme and still work the same. There's some custom front-matter in markdown files, but change that to regular YAML and it will just work.
Link at the bottom of your example page results in 404. For me, anyway.
ah yeah, sorry work in progress. There is a link to the repo https://github.com/Local-Cafe/localcafe-lite
I'm getting NXDOMAIN, and various online resolution tools [0] show the same.
[0] https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=a%3alocalcafe.or...
A couple of things:
First, the site generator is MIT licensed but I don't see a link to the license. If someone forks this generator, would they be in compliance with MIT license requirements?
Second, the images linked in this site are quite nice. I can imagine someone choosing to use some of them as is. Are they yours to share?
Third, it appears that you are targeting non-developers. I would think about how to make it as easy as possible to customize. Decisions like putting images in "priv/output/images" seems a bit confusing.
First: https://github.com/Local-Cafe/localcafe-lite/blob/main/LICEN...
Second: pixabay
Third: Yeah that's the challenge I'm working on at the moment. Thanks for the feed back.
I do plan on cleaning up the repo so that you are not starting with the example and also plan on making a small tutorial video to show how much effort it takes to setup.