This SaaS (Software as a Service) offering has actually been rebranded as a SSGaS, which is a static Website generator as a service. It provides a front-end for the popular Hugo static Website engine when publishing GitHub Pages Content, so you get a GUI that takes care of all the difficult setup & command line stuff for you, including themes.
Unless you have a very complex, often updated & customizable Site, nowadays people are moving away from dynamic Content Management Systems (CMS), which generate Content on the fly, & are based on database lookups that can sometimes take forever to complete. The new game in town for small to medium complexity Sites is to use static Website generators, of which Hugo is among the leaders.
Static Sites are much faster, as all Content doesn’t have to be generated newly (or looked up in a caching service) every time a user requests viewing a page. They’re more secure as they’re not vulnerable to common hack attacks like Joomla, Worpress, Drupal & their ilk. It’s also easy to use them for versioning, since the Content of the Sites is stored in flat files, making them a cinch for project collaboration Sites on GitHub & its version control system: Git.
To use appernetic, you need to get a GitHub account, which is free & gives you access to their GitHub Pages, then you just clone your Hugo project repository, or create a skeleton file from scratch, use the appernetic tree viewer & PageDown visual editor. Then you clone a theme & add dynamic Website Content using an external service, like SumoMe or Disqus, preview your site & finally, publish the Site to GitHub pages.
Appernetic has all of the bells & whistles you’d be expect in an authoring environment & even in a CMS, like image editing, theme management, responsive design for mobile devices, excellent organization (Project, Preview & Public projects are kept separate) & version control using Git.
Finally, 1 of its greatest advantages is the fact that you can minimize the use of server resources & not worry about unexpected traffic peaks & surges, since you’re just serving flat, static HTML files.
This service is under development by Sweden-based startup MolnSys & its founder Göran Svensson. You can subscribe to the service from appernetic’s main web page here, & get a free subscription to try it out, & if you’d like to keep using it, you pay the required fees.
– This post is merely a startup profile based on publicly available information & not a review. –
Image Credit: appernetic
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