Need for meta-automation of small websites & the use of static website generators

[fititnt]

One common and relative easily to automate from the plan idea (here: text information, the data) to a small product is smaller websites. Considering that important products, services or ideas that do not have a dedicated team but the lack of some place to display such information could affect other areas, for example expend much more time on harder tasks for coworkers, but does not have one place to prove, start to be a win-win here.

Note: this meta-automation is only for who already have no internal process to create their own small websites

Static website generators

A static web site generator is an application that takes plain text files and compiles them to HTML files. -- Awesome Static Web Site Generators

One way to create websites is write static website, with plain HTML files. To require less skill and provide automation before the need of a full CMS to a bigger or with more advanced requirements, exist some tools, called static (web)site generators.

In the context of automation, we have some advantages here. To list a few:

Note: these advantages would require or our support or some pre-existent process to not require from the end user how to learn do the automation itself

• The use require no skill to write HTML, and could be formated using markdown
• Could have the content written using some WYSIWYG editor using Static CMS that also save the content on the final website
• Play very nice with a lot of automations
• Low vendor lock-in (data used to generate website is near the plain information, so is easier to change;)
• Can have automatic backup with version control system
• Can be used hosted for free with GitHub Pages
• Can be used as public proof of your activity on websites like GitHub

Accountability and easier distributed backup

In ethics and governance, accountability is answerability, blameworthiness, liability, and the expectation of account-giving.[1] As an aspect of governance, it has been central to discussions related to problems in the public sector, nonprofit and private (corporate) and individual contexts. In leadership roles,[2] accountability is the acknowledgment and assumption of responsibility for actions, products, decisions, and policies including the administration, governance, and implementation within the scope of the role or employment position and encompassing the obligation to report, explain and be answerable for resulting consequences. Wikipedia: Accountability

In cases where accountability is desired, the meta-automation with static websites stored on a public servers like GitHub provide, by default, one extra layer of backup and accountability. Considering that one of the main reasons is help groups that already do not have previus dedicated person to this task and that who use our meta-automation would like to be used as proof of existence of the evolution of the group, that another win-win

Final thoughts

The need was because we starting to get repetitive talking about us or our projects on emails, but we were delaying writing about in a standard location and, second reason, as very generic help someone who learn with us to implement with final groups, this is a good start.

Our plan for now is just do the first layers of automation. Like someone could write a specific folder on his dropbox personal account and for each change it also updates the remote website. But at some point a chatops agent with some basic Natural-language Processing could act as a personal assistant to change specific parts of a page or even with Speech recognition from one audio upload from some non-enterprise chat, like a generic WhatsApp/WeChat/Telegram/Messager from researcher at some remote location could serve as faster input. These features to convert audio to text are really desired by some people who work outside office.

For now, let's just do the basics to allow improvement later.

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Note: meta-automation is used as "way to discover how we or other people could automate a process that partially could be done with automation"; maybe is not the best word to describe.