A huge high-five and welcome to Netlify for the sponsorship this week.
If you haven’t heard of Netlify, the big thing you should know is that it’s web hosting, but more than that. It’s web hosting with the developer workflow squarely at heart. You can spin up a site on Netlify in literally seconds. One way is through their robust CLI. Another way, that I find very comfortable (and just did the other day), is to log into the Netlify web interface, create a new site, and connect a Git repo to it. Plus I can give it a command that will run my site’s build process when I push to master. Now anything I push up goes live on my website, which is HTTPS and on a CDN. Uh, wow. Of course, I can also point a custom domain name at Netlify and now we’re cooking with gas.
The JAMstack is at the heart of Netlify. It’s static file hosting, because static file hosting is super fast and secure. It means you can build your site with all kinds of fun, powerful, modern site generators like Hugo, Gatsby, Metalsmith, or 11ty. The site I spun up myself was my own custom thing with a Gulp build process that ran Sass and Nunjucks.
Try spinning up a Gatsby site right now!
Static sites aren’t just HTML-only zero-interactivity stone statues.
In fact, I think static sites are one of the ingredients to the larger world of serverless technology, in which functionality is handled by services that are perfect for the job.
Netlify knows this, of course, so they’ve released has some brand spanking new features that allow you to add interactivity and functionality to your site:
Form Handling
Just add a netlify attribute to the