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Glitch Instant Sites — Make a live, full-stack or static website in under a minute
Create & launch a real, full-stack or static site at a live URL using frameworks like React or Eleventy, all in under a minute in your browser — for free. Glitch lets you make a site faster & easier than a no-code tool or site builder, but with no lock-in.
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@rrhoover There have been so many cool sites built as people tested out these tools, but honestly some of the most satisfying stuff has been hearing people say things like "I was meaning to try out vite as a build script, but hadn't had a chance" or "i got stuck trying to build dependencies for that framework" and then saying that now these updates to Glitch meant that they could just create instead of having to wrestle with the tools.
Glitch has been around for a while, but this is just about our biggest update ever — we wanted it to be faster to build a site with code, using standard javascript frameworks, than it is to use some proprietary site builder. For me, the best part is that all the fussy stuff like configuring a build system or installing a secure certificate is already handled for me.
The glitch ui is very clean in my opinion, it's uses my screen space very efficiently, even on devices like my laptop. An unique feature the editor has is some of the buttons have emojis next to the buttons. I especially like the kind of buttons they use because they're not too big and not too small. The overall aesthetic that glitch is going for is also quite nice, each project gets their own colorful page.
The only things that kind of annoy me are
1. The slow redirect when you are logged in and visit glitch.com
2. The lack of better handling of connection failures. The editor could back up your code locally, then provide some sort of diff/merge interface when you get your connection back.
3. Not having autocomplete, which feels like it might be slowing me down.
I think I've said it before, but it's either my monitor or the purple in the dark theme makes me think of eggplants.
Some of the other observations I've made in the past
1. Support for mobile and mobile with hardware keyboards is very well done.
2. Multi-user collaboration works a lot better than the other online editor I've tried. The editor rarely produces ghost characters (characters that are in your code but you can't see in the code editor).
The introduction of generated static sites is exciting because I can now set up tools like sass, tsc, and parcel. I'm looking forward to create a version of hello-webpage that automatically minifies your code, resizes your images, and optimizes in many other ways.
@awesome_cat Thanks so much for the thoughtful feedback — and your supercharged version of hello-webpage sounds like it would be amazing!
I'm super stoked about introducing more folks to Eleventy and generated static sites in general. I've been migrating a Tumblr blog over to a remix of the Eleventy starter and, even with a build process, the experience is super snappy - in the editor and in serving the generated site!
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