It all started last Christmas when I was looking to move from my Ghost setup to a static-site generator. I had suffered from a server incident that took my website offline and was looking for a solution where my online presence didn't depend on a server going down while I was sleeping. I looked around for better options and noticed that a few sites I had on Vercel had a 100% uptime in the last three months and started looking into Vercel and static sites. While my main concern was with uptime, other benefits like almost instant loading times, incredible scaling, or unbreakable security (there's nothing to hack when you're dealing with HTML files) motivated me to make the move. I continued using Ghost as a data source but switched to Jigsaw.
It took a while to get things where I wanted them to be. I had to rewrite my Ghost theme to a new templating engine, modify some of the Jigsaw core to make it work like I wanted to, and manually trigger a new build every time I changed something. It also meant an added layer of complexity, not being able to instantly preview my changes and more things that distracted me from writing, which is why I had been using Ghost in the first place. I ended up getting all the static benefits, but at a high time & complexity cost, so I started thinking about how to make switching simpler.
What I set out to build was a one-click solution that got rid of all the drawbacks that I had experienced and worked with any platform, be it Ghost, WordPress, Statamic, a Laravel-based blog, or any other CMS. I worked on it for a few days, but some technical problems with my implementation made me give up. I threw the code on a private repo and forgot about it.
Fast-forward to LaraconEU, where a great talk about improving performance gave me some tips on how could I make my implementation work. I then rescued my old code and managed to get a basic prototype working and, after some consideration, I've decided to dedicate myself to building a platform that allows others to skip all the work I had to do.
You can learn more about Sitesauce and sign up for early access on our website. Keep an eye out for updates!