Max Böck: Emergency Website Kit
In cases of emergency, many organizations need a quick way to publish critical information. But existing (CMS) websites are often unable to handle sudden spikes in traffic.
Like so many others, I’m currently in voluntary quarantine at home - and I used some time this weekend to put a small boilerplate together for this exact usecase.
Here’s the main idea:
• generate a static site with Eleventy
• minimal markup, inlined CSS
• aim to transmit everything in the first connection roundtrip (~14KB)
• progressively enable offline-support w/ Service Worker
• set up Netlify CMS for easy content editing
• one-click deployment via Netlify
The site contains only the bare minimum - no webfonts, no tracking, no unnecessary images. The entire thing should fit in a single HTTP request. It’s basically just a small, ultra-lean blog focused on maximum resilience and accessibility. The Service Worker takes it a step further from there so if you’ve visited the site once, the information is still accessible even if you lose network coverage.
The end result is just a set of static files that can be easily hosted on cloud infrastructure and put on a CDN. Netlify does this out of the box, but other providers or privately owned servers are possible as well.