Foreword

The issues of Website security and performance continue to loom large, with organisations large and small continuing to suffer severe loss of service following a compromise — whether a site gets defaced, Google results become hijacked, or, more seriously, personal data is breached.

As will be described below, MakeStaticSite already offers a freely available solution (which has been implemented for this site), but it requires a certain level of technical knowledge. However, further development is on the way to provide a Web-based service that will be simple and easy to use. A proof of concept has already been implemented and been successfully tested, which should pave the way for business investment.

What’s the problem?

Security issues arise largely from the way the content is generated and delivered to site visitors using server-side processing, which typically involves scripts and databases to select and deliver specific text, multimedia, and so on. For example, content management systems (such as WordPress and Drupal) are based on PHP and MySQL, which, if misconfigured, might yield not only the desired pages but be open to requests crafted to subvert the setup and yield unintended access. Thus, maintaining the security of such a setup is an ongoing process that requires continual vigilance, responding promptly to security notices with the installation of updates, but it’s a race against time and there’s no guarantee that all vulnerabilities will be spotted.

MakeStaticSite belongs to the class of software known as static site generators, which removes all the dynamic components from public exposure, replacing them with a set of web pages (plain HTML, CSS, JavaScript) that require no server-side processing. The pages are prepared beforehand in a safer environment, such as an individual’s laptop or a shared space behind a firewall, protected by strict access controls. This simplifies the delivery process as well as helping with security. Shell scripting is used, making available various tools to handle different aspects of the task. An introductory post provides an overview of the processes involved.

For developers and system administrators, MakeStaticSite provides a convenient means to set up and manage the automatic creation and deployment of static versions of websites. Such sites can be administered locally and then deployed remotely to some other hosting provider. Strictly speaking, this is not an archival tool as the output is not an exact mirror, but a version of the site that preserves content whilst aiming to remain current. For example, RSS feeds are saved and then renamed with .xml extensions, and further files may be added.

Anyone who has some familiarity with the command line should be able to use the tool to assist in maintaining their sites, though such an interface is off-putting to some. Further, a scripting-based approach has been chosen to make this tool widely accessible for developers to further fine-tune; a number of refinements are already included that augment the standard use of Wget, such as support for arbitrary attributes and, in the case of WordPress, the use of WP-CLI to prepare sites beforehand.

MakeStaticSite has been released as open source software, available under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 . For further details, please refer to the project site, makestaticsite.sh. Many thanks to various developers for sharing their knowledge on shell scripting, particularly on blogs and Q&A websites such as Stack Exchange and to those who have tested, commented on and otherwise supported MakeStaticSite.

Hosted Web Service

In its present form, it is technical in nature, aimed at developers and system administrators. However, as a further development, a hosted Web service is being developed, with a simple user interface.

The user logs in to a central dashboard to maintain their projects. By following a link or clicking a button, they can launch their CMS editor, build a static version of the site and browse the output.

How you can help!

At this stage, we are looking for investment. Please get in touch to try out the demo and to arrange for a presentation.

The generous ethos is admirable. Indeed, whereas the spotlight has recently been shone on software developers to become more aware of certain ethical issues, along with pressure to change their practices, there is in fact much to be learnt from that community. I have tried to intimate this in Open Sources: A Higher Consciousness in Software Development, a paper I gave at an unusual conference on the theme of wisdom.

As a developer myself, I am largely self-taught since the 1980s. It may explain why, when solving programming problems, I can be somewhat unconventional and occasionally original.

Open Source contributions

I’m not a prolific or fluent coder, but have contributed to a few open source projects and am currently working on two.

• MakeStaticSite, a static site generator and deployer, is a Bash script that I already use to generate static versions of locally-developed WordPress sites (like this one and research.siga.la). It is release as free/open source software under AGPL v.3 and is available for download.
• WP Offline Search is a further refinement of my fork of WP Static Search by Gergely Szerovay, who developed a WordPress plugin based on Lunr.js. As I’ve not received any response to my pull requests and have reworked quite a lot of the code, I changed the name and intend to set up a new repository.
• epubcheck-web (contributor) – enabling standards-based checking of ePub documents to help self-publishing, motivated by my experiences of self-publishing a Kindle book (see especially the EPUB conversion report slides).

I hope to share the Sigala code likewise, once it has reached a certain level of maturity.

For my work using other people’s software, take a look at the portfolio.

Legacy software, but enduring paradigms

At the turn of the millennium, there was no universal means for authors to edit and maintain their content through their web browser. The technical solutions that existed tended to work only on specific platforms, carried a fee, or else require a Java plugin.

In response, I devised one, NetWedit, possibly the world’s first cross-platform JavaScript-based solution, released under GNU LGPL, in the days when I still thought that the first ‘L’ stood for ‘library’ rather than ‘lesser’. It was experimental and used a crafty method, but it worked well enough for members of Oxford University’s Theology Faculty to maintain their profiles for a teach and learning resources database.

As browser DOM support improved, I subsequently enhanced the functionality, but kept the same basic user interface, to produce RTWedit, which was incorporated into early versions of WebLearn, Oxford University’s centrally-hosted virtual learning environment.

Standards have moved on and browsers only maintain limited backwards compatibility, so my tools don’t work in a standard desktop today, but the approach of working from first principles is ever-relevant. I’ve recorded some notes in a retrospective piece, Adventures in the Read/Write Web.

Nowadays, we take for granted the fact that we can write content in systems such as WordPress and Drupal using a rich text editor with an experience similar to that in a word processor. Such editors, based on packages such as TinyMCE and CK Editor are still written in JavaScript.

Here are a few highlights. For details, pleased browse the portfolio.

March 2000

Open Source Wisdom

I delivered a paper, Open Sources: A Higher Consciousness in Software Development, at To Catch the Bird of Heaven: A conference on ‘wisdom’, which took place 27-29 March 2000, at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.   I’ve kept a brief programme summary.

4 November 2001

Public Release of NetWedit

I released NetWedit with GPL license, possibly the world’s first cross-platform JavaScript-powered rich text editor, deployed in a teaching-based CMS, where Oxford’s Theology Faculty could maintain their own profiles.  Read more in Adventures in the Read/Write Web.

2002

Editing XML with XSLT

The Interactive Audio Comprehension Materials (IACM) project at Oxford University’s Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages enabled academics to generate learning paths, including audio segments, with all data stored in XML.
I devised a means of editing XML using XSLT, based on correctness preserving transformations; changes to specific nodes were targeted with XPATH. Beyond the technical achievement there are significant reflections on structure and flow.

2002-2003

CD2Go – A static web production system

I conceived and implemented an extension of a CGI/Perl website to a static web production system, preserving all the interactive multimedia content. Inherently secure, the content remains online, though browsers no long support most interactive functions. The same system was used for a Japanese site.

09/2004 – 04/2005

RAMBLE project

As Principle Investigator of this ostensibly technical project at Oxford, showcasing service-oriented architecture (SOA) between personal learning spaces and institutional LMS, I uncovered insights into the conditions that foster deeper learning, as intimated in an article for Ariadne.

December 2010

New Architecture for Social Networking Online

I gave my first paper on a multi-dimensional relationship model based on the Buddha’s teachings, the foundations for the Sigala project. This was in the social sciences track at the 3rd World Conference on Buddhism and Science at Mahidol University, Thailand.

2019-2021

A Vision for the History of Science Museum

On a different note, I have applied a holistic approach to envisioning how a museum can be a hub for a scientific ecosystem with proper accountability across the University. The blog post illustrates the ongoing process of refinement to my ideas.

2021

Offline Search for WordPress

Twenty years after starting work on CD2Go, I returned to the problem of searching static snapshots of CMS, now updated to WordPress. After some radical changes to an existing plugin, I now have a solution (which you can try out by downloading the Sigala research site.)