We recently released Glitch in Bio, an easy to use, fully customizable link-sharing app. Since then we’ve been delighted and inspired by the amazing remixes you’ve been creating. We’ve also received lots of extremely useful feedback and suggestions for developing the project–which we couldn’t wait to get stuck into. We wanted to take advantage of how easy it is to iterate on this project and continue delivering enhancements.

You can now remix the first update of Glitch in Bio, improved by community contributions!

Connect to all of your networks more easily than ever, thanks to the newest social icons suggested or added by community members:

Mastodon courtesy of this @evermorian remix

Bandcamp both requested by @smilinggoat in the forum thread

Ko-Fi, also from Andy Piper who included incredibly helpful notes inside the project

Your Glitch in Bio page can better serve everyone in your audience thanks to all of these accessibility enhancements suggested by @pixely:

Increased contrast in the default ‘glitch’ theme

Image alt text – you’ll see a new property in ‘settings.json’ allowing you to add alt text to your images that will automatically be populated in the markup.

Focus states on links throughout the app for easier keyboard interaction

And finally, a few tweaks to improve the app UX:

Less flickery icons thanks to more consistent hover states

Better page descriptions on Twitter thanks to the ‘og:description’ update explained in Andy Piper’s fantastic blog post write-up of remixing the app

The remix button gets updated text with clearer language by @metamoar

If you already have a remix of Glitch in Bio and want to update it, visit the main project and grab the new parts:

Copy the content of layout/social.html into your own

In settings.json, add the icons you want in the ‘social’ object

Copy the content of public/styles/style.css (and public/styles/themes/glitch.css, if you’re using it)

Copy layout/links.html and layout/social.html for the alt text and keyboard focus. 

In settings.json include an ‘altText’ property for each link with an image you want to supply text for

Copy the content of layout/glitch-footer.html

In addition to theme remixes we’ve also been seeing some very interesting developments on the app functionality that we’ll also dive into soon! The project is completely customizable–check out the help docs for tips on how to edit your remix. And don’t forget your Gitch in Bio site is also a Progressive Web App (PWA) your users can install on their devices.

We’re not done! Keep sharing your feedback and submitting your Glitch in Bio templates and we’ll keep building this project together. 

Glitch In Bio, now community improved

With the launch of our new “Glitch In Bio” starter project, we’ve seen thousands of creators make link pages for their social media in an inspiring variety of ways. But there’s something interesting happening behind the scenes with Glitch in Bio that points to an exciting new opportunity for the open web.

PWAs, or progressive web apps, are a way of giving apps built on web technologies the same features and finishing touches as the native mobile apps we use on our phones and other devices every day. PWAs have been around for a while, but are still not as broadly adopted by users as they might be, because most of the time, it takes extra technical work to turn a regular web app or web page into a PWA. Often, that work falls onto the list of things we file under “I’ll do that later…”

The good news is, thanks to the defaults we’ve set on Glitch, every single one of the Glitch In Bio link pages that’s been built is already a PWA. It’s built right into the project. And it’s the first step on a larger path of giving every creator the benefits of PWAs without all the technical hassles of setup or configuration.

Having your app function as a PWA brings a number of advantages. 

Being a PWA makes your app installable on user devices vs just being accessible through the web browser. This creates a higher quality experience that’s more like native (and you can enhance it to leverage native functionalities like notifications).

PWAs are more discoverable because they’re shareable by link and easily optimized for search engines, as well as being available through app stores, which means you can make it discoverable to a whole new audience, and even optionally monetize it! 

Last but not least, PWAs create a more resilient and inclusive user experience because your content is cached for offline use, so users can still access them even with restricted connectivity. Since Glitch in Bio is a generated static site, it’s highly performant and delivers content to the user super quickly by default.

Your Glitch in Bio app is all set up to function as a PWA when you remix it, but you can of course edit or enhance its functionality. The site style is already responsive to display nicely on mobile devices, and will cache the default HTML and CSS.

There are only two additional files in your project, both inside the public folder:

manifest.json which specifies the metadata required for the app to function as a PWA, including icons and the start URL

sw.js–the service worker, which specifies caching behavior for the app, including when the user is offline

Your project’s HTML page head imports both of these, in layout > head.html. To see the PWA behavior in action, open your browser dev tools and choose Application.

Your project will work out of the box as a PWA, but as you edit your Glitch in Bio project, there are a couple of details you might want to further customize in the PWA settings:

Icons: If you add your own images, including them in the list of cached files in sw.js will make them available for offline use

Metadata: If you take a look in manifest.json, you’ll see the settings that’ll determine how the app functions when installed on a user device, so you can update the text and images to suit your project

Files: If you use additional files such as your own CSS theme, add them to the list in sw.js for caching too

If you want to take things even further, you can submit your PWA to any app stores that serve your audience. There are simple instructions for submission to the Google Play store for ChromeOS, the Windows App Store, and even open source tools that will help you submit a PWA to the iOS App Store.

There are also lots of options when it comes to PWA behavior–your Glitch in Bio site will initially attempt to fetch the page from the web and only use the cache if there is no response. This is known as “network falling back to cache” but you can alter it to suit your own needs: check out the Google Developer guidance for more.

If you customize or extend the PWA component in your Glitch in Bio remix please let us know about it! We're eager to share your creativity with the rest of the community. You can also join the community in the Glitch forum to talk through your ideas for your page.

Revealed: Your Glitch in Bio page is a PWA!

As they say, and now for something completely different. Today, we are excited to share with you the latest from the Glitch lab: Glitch In Bio. It’s unlike any other Glitch launch we’ve done before—we built a mobile-friendly, free, fully customizable landing page to use as your “Link in bio.”

➡️ Start creating your own Glitch In Bio by remixing the Glitch In Bio app right now!

If you’ve spent any time on Instagram or TikTok or Twitch, you’ve seen people using various tools to create link pages. So how is this different? Glitch In Bio lets you direct traffic to a single link without limiting how you can share, create or customize. Since Glitch runs real apps, you have the ease of instantly publishing your links, without sacrificing access to all the parts of the web that you want to share with the world. Popular tools for building bio links severely limit what you can include and how you can customize. They even sometimes make you pay just to link to things you want to show off! Glitch In Bio lets you include anything the web can do, for free.

We have a lot of fun things in store for Glitch In Bio to help all kinds of creators promote their links, including:

Free extensions to the app that cater to the different needs of the community: analytics that you own, donation widgets, custom themes, ways to show off your favorite media, and more.

Tutorials to show how to make your Glitch In Bio really your own, regardless of how many lines of code you’ve written before.

Get started creating your own Glitch In Bio by checking out our featured playlist of Glitch In Bio remixes from the community! If you have a theme or addition you want to show off, we'd love to see it. Just share it with us using this form, and we’ll be featuring the best customizations right here on Glitch.

Announcing Glitch In Bio, the easiest way to share your links!

Today, we’re introducing Playlists to Glitch — bringing all the power of organizing, sharing and discovering new apps, in a way that’s as familiar and fun as the playlists you use to manage music, videos, or anything else. (And good news: we’ve migrated all existing Collections on Glitch to be playlists, so there are already over 100,000 to explore!) 

Remember making a mixed tape? Or burning a CD with your favorite songs on them? Or—what’s the modern-day equivalent—creating a playlist on your favorite streaming app? Playlists are as fun to make as they are to receive. Both activities are labors of love and creativity. Most importantly, playlists are an instrument to help our community’s projects reach the people who would most find joy in using them.

Glitch is built around an important idea, that creating and sharing apps is as important as creating and sharing photos, documents, videos or anything else. So of course it should be just as fun and easy! So that’s why we’ve created playlists. Borrowing from the familiar metaphor we’ve all come to know, playlists of apps make it easy to share a collection of apps or projects while adding useful context, for yourself or for others.

The first thing you need to know about playlists is you don’t need to know how to code to create and curate playlists. In fact, being a playlist curator is a great way to be a creator on Glitch, just like making apps is. You get all the same joys of sharing creativity with the world and doing something helpful for the community, and the opportunity for others to thank you for sharing.

Each playlist features newly styled project cards stacked vertically in the order of your choosing. To the right of the cards, curators can add notes on any app in a playlist, to explain why the app is useful, or just to help you remember what you liked about a project you saved. 

Don’t forget to give your playlist a title. You can also add a description at the top, to help describe what colleagues and community members can expect from your playlist. Maybe it’s a themed playlist, or a series of tutorials, or just a collection of your greatest hits!

Play mode: To make it even easier to discover apps in playlists, we’ve made a playback mode where you can walk through all the apps in a playlist. It’s perfect for learners who want to step through a list of related apps, or just to check out a series of projects for inspiration.

Playlist curation is a great way to organize your profile, collect apps from the rest of the community, and share Glitch apps with others. That’s why we wanted to make it even easier to highlight creators. At the bottom of each playlist you curate, people will be able to see other apps and projects you’ve built. And it’s easier than ever to show the love! You can thank playlist creators right from the playlist, just like you can thank app creators everywhere on Glitch. It’s a nice way to make their day brighter, and yours too!

If you poke around Glitch.com, you’ll see some other updates.

Creating playlists is one way to update your Glitch profile, but we wanted to make it all look snazzy. Each individual project page has been updated to reflect the new card styles presented in playlists, as well as highlights the additional apps or projects a project creator has built, making it even easier to surface great apps from the Glitch community. The new cards style for projects also now show up in search results.  Lastly, on keeping things cool: As always, we care about keeping Glitch a friendly and welcoming place for everyone, so we’ve made it simpler than ever to flag things on Glitch that might be potentially troublesome. Click the report abuse button to flag anything that’s not up to our community standards.

In order to spark creativity or maybe just pique your curiosity, we’re sharing some playlists the Glitch team put together to help get you started.

But that’s not nearly enough examples, so here are some playlists from the Glitch community we think are pretty great. 

Things to make and do with Vue.js by @stegriff

Six Superb Sunday Sites by @jhnbngtssn – Read our interview with John to learn about Sunday Sites - maybe your app will end up on this playlist!

Art or math? by @rowan-m poses (and possibly answers) the most important question in computer science. 

There’s a lot more in store for the Glitch community this fall, but we’re very excited to see what you’ll do with playlists. Playlists give us at Glitch an opportunity to showcase more of your creations to the rest of the world, too, including on /create-project and even in search results! So get out there and create some playlists, friends, and share your favorites with us at community@glitch.com, on Twitter at @glitch, and on the Glitch forum.  ☺️

Today, we’re introducing Playlists to Glitch — bringing all the power of organizing, sharing and discovering new apps, in a way that’s as familiar and fun as the playlists you use to manage music, videos, or anything else.

Introducing Playlists, the best way to curate and share Glitch apps!

One of the best parts of Glitch is that you can go from idea to sharing in seconds, and we’re always on a quest to further improve your time-to-hello-world without complicated tooling or lock-in. Last year we launched the Glitch.new shortcut to help that cause. Since then, we’ve seen thousands of apps created with Glitch.new, as well as an overwhelmingly positive response from the community!

Now, thanks to all of your excellent feedback and shortcut requests, we’re excited to announce an entirely new Glitch.new.

Now, starting up your next React app is now as simple as going to glitch.new/react. And there are similar shortcuts for all the most popular frameworks used to build on Glitch!

But what if you don’t see your favorite framework? We’ve got you covered! You can create a shortcut for any public project on glitch by using glitch.new/~[project-name]. 

Plus, here’s one more superpower: You can use glitch.new to import from GitHub. Just put glitch.new in front of any GitHub repo URL in your browser, and you’ll instantly have that repo imported and running on Glitch.

More shortcuts mean more kinds of developers can get to “hello, world” faster. We can’t wait to see what you create with the new Glitch.new, built for and inspired by feedback from the friendliest community of coders.

Have an idea for a great shortcut to add to Glitch.new, let us know in the Glitch forum! 

Just launched: a whole new glitch.new shortcut, that makes it faster and easier than ever to create any kind of app instantly in your browser. Make a new full stack React or Eleventy app, remix any Glitch app, or even import a GitHub repo, all just by typing glitch.new.

Glitch.new (and improved!) shortcuts

You can do a lot of cool stuff on Glitch, but what first drew me to the platform as a user was the ability to easily build and host APIs. I still can’t quite believe you can hit a button and immediately have a hosted API available for making client requests, backed by persistent data storage. If that isn’t enough, you can jump in and start editing in the browser, seeing the results straight away, with no deployment process whatsoever. 🤯

So needless to say, I’ve been having fun working on the new set of data apps I’ll talk a little about in this post. We’ll run through the available options, whether you’re hosting your data on Glitch or connecting to an external service. We’ll also take a look at our minimal no-frills version, and find out how you can switch to your own data provider, use your project as an API, or just tear it apart and turn it into whatever you like.

The app concept we’ve used in all of the Hello data projects is a user poll on favorite coding languages. The homepage lists the poll and presents results in a chart when the user casts a vote. An Admin page shows a log of votes, and allows deletion when you set up an admin key by following the steps in the README.

These projects are intended to follow on from Hello Node, using a similar pattern–a server script returning data to a user interface with Handlebars templating.

When you remix the Hello SQLite project, Glitch will build you a copy of the underlying database, making your app work out of the box with no setup steps. 

The database files are placed in the .data folder, which you should use to securely store any data you add to your apps, as the folder is not copied when a project is remixed. The data starter projects also use the .env for secure storage of access keys: How do I store secrets, credentials, or private data?

What we’re going for here is coverage of the primary operations you’d need in a database backed app–queries, inserts, updates, and deletes. Authentication / authorization is a huge barrier when learning about anything data-related, so we wanted to introduce the idea of auth without wading knee-deep into a full auth flow, which is not only a pain, but frankly not the most fun part of working data when you’re just getting started.

A common pitfall in building demos for data is allowing the user to post without requiring auth. You can of course do whatever you like in your own remixes, but for the official Glitch apps we need to be mindful of the risks in allowing anonymous users to post data that other people in our lovely community will see. This is why we went for a poll, since you can only submit a vote for existing options. 😅

As with our recent series of core Hello apps, the data apps include next steps you can try out in TODO.md, so that you can get stuck into an edit straight away, and take it from there. 🚀

Third-party data integration with Airtable and DataStax

Hosted SQLite is handy for ease of setup, and lets us minimize learning barriers by keeping people within the Glitch environment, but as you work on real world projects, you’re likely to integrate data from a third-party service. This is where our Airtable and DataStax projects come into play.

Hello Airtable provides a low-friction data storage option with setup steps outlined in the README. We’ve included a link to a base you can copy so that the app will work as soon as you’re set up. 

Copy the base, grab your ID and API key, pop them into your Glitch project, and off you go.

We’ve been loving collaborating with the DataStax team on the Hello Astra project, which uses Astra DB, a persistent cloud database that gives you all the power of Cassandra but without the complexity of setting it up. For a distributed, highly scalable data service, there are remarkably few steps required to get started–each outlined in the README. 

Expect to get your own database ready and connected to Glitch in the space of a few minutes.

Our Hello apps are primarily optimized for learning, with lots of bells and whistles demonstrating a variety of functionalities, plus a nice front-end so that you see something when you visit a project’s page. This is good for beginners, but for those who just want to get a project up and running with as little hassle as possible–we have blank versions of the starters.

The blank SQLite project gives you a minimal outline of CRUD operations, with a sample data model representing a list of chat messages. This app has no front-end, so the home route just returns a list of the available endpoints (courtesy of Fastify hooks). The sqlite.js module handles managing the database, with server.js calling the methods available to retrieve, add, update, and delete (with endpoints returning JSON). To change the data model, alter the setup code in the SQLite script.

We’ve tried to build these projects in a modular fashion so that you can pull out whatever bits you want and bin or ignore the rest.

Our Hello data apps support sending and receiving raw JSON if you want to use them without the front-end. You can make requests to the endpoints from any client of your choice, supplying a query parameter: ?raw=json (try glitch-hello-sqlite.glitch.me/?raw=json in your browser or client to see it in action). 

We structured these apps to handle the database operations in a dedicated module for the relevant provider. In the src folder you’ll see sqlite.js, airtable.js, or astra.js, with methods called by the server script whenever an endpoint receives a request.

This means that you can swap out an existing database for another one, just by replacing the data handler script. The server will continue to work as long as you provide the same methods in your data module, and include the script name in data.json, for the database property.

If you remix with a different database, let us know how you get on!

You can do a lot of cool stuff on Glitch, but what first drew me to the platform as a user was the ability to easily build and host APIs. I still can’t quite believe you can hit a button and immediately have a hosted API available for making client requests, backed by persistent data storage. If that isn’t enough, you can jump in and start editing in the browser, seeing the results straight away, with no deployment process whatsoever. 🤯

So needless to say, I’ve been having fun working on the new set of data apps I’ll talk a little about in this post. We’ll run through the available options, whether you’re hosting your data on Glitch or connecting to an external service. We’ll also take a look at our minimal no-frills version, and find out how you can switch to your own data provider, use your project as an API, or just tear it apart and turn it into whatever you like.

Dive into the new Glitch data starter apps

Good news — after the wonderful response to our recent huge updates to Glitch, we’re back with even more of what you — the Glitch community — asked for.

Now running a real database behind your app is as easy as remixing

We’ve launched four brand-new starters that instantly set up some of the most popular database options for your app automatically. 

~glitch-hello-sqlite: A simple, powerful full-stack app backed by a SQLite database

~glitch-blank-sqlite: That same SQLite app, but with just the basics to get started

~glitch-hello-airtable: Use your data in Airtable to power your Glitch app!

~glitch-hello-datastax: It’s a Cassandra database app, powered by our friends at Datastax

Now, you can experiment with creating archives, backups, collaborative apps, and more with the power of persistent data storage. 

Imagine having a full-stack node app running a Cassandra database, in under a minute. Thanks to our amazing Glitch community, that's now possible, along with lots of other improvements to building full-stack (and even database-powered!) apps.

Try out Blank starter apps and improved next steps

We loved this idea from the community, so now Blank starter apps are available for most of the Glitch starter apps. Blank is truly the best way to describe these minimal starter versions of the apps, and we’re very excited to see how you use them! We’ll create Blank options for all of our Hello starter apps going forward. (No more having to delete parts you’re not using!)

Another update to the current roster of Hello starter apps is the new “Try this next” in TODO.md, which gives you a simple list of tips on what to try next once you’ve created a new app.

Look for the TODO.md file in our Hello apps. It’s got a few suggestions for things you might want to try next with your new app. Let us know if you try any of them out!


Check out curated collections and start gathering your own

Search no more, curated collections are back! Now, you can find the new (and classic!) starters on /create-project along with a showcase of apps made by the community. 

We’re always on the lookout for apps and collections to share with the community, so let us know if you’ve curated any that we should share by posting them to the Support Forum gallery. 

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any fresher

Finally, because you know we like to keep things fresh, we’ve made some performance updates resulting in a significantly faster load of Glitch.com (up to 3 times faster!). This is just the first step toward even bigger new community features to come. 

We can’t think of anything fresher than showing appreciation back to the community so now you can thank users just by hovering. This makes it easier than ever to thank fellow members of the community for their awesome contributions. Don’t be shy about thanking your fellow community members, it’ll make their day.

As you try out these new starters, features, and updates, be sure to tag us on Twitter or email community@glitch.com so we can share your handy work with the Glitch community. We want to tell the world about what you make, so don’t be shy. Your work helps inspire everyone else in the community!

Good news — after the wonderful response to our recent huge updates to Glitch, we’re back with even more of what you — the Glitch community — asked for.

Data-driven full stack apps — running instantly!

Recently, we launched a whole new set of starter apps on Glitch, with the goal of making it nearly instant to build apps using the latest and greatest frameworks. Naturally, while creating these new experiences, we wanted things to be simple. But that raised an important question:

Going back a few years, we built Glitch around the idea that anyone should be able to create a real website or app using standard code, right from their browser, and have it up and running instantly. Today, that’s more or less the case, and the evidence is that clever folks (like you!) have used Glitch to build over ten million apps.

For some users, like students learning to code for the first time, “simple” may best mean “has the fewest distractions”. And in that context, distractions can be things like metadata or configuration options that, while useful for a production website, might require a lot of confusing explanation at a point when a learner is first trying to understand the major concepts they’re wrangling with.

By contrast, for coders who may be familiar with web development in general, but might not know the specifics of a new framework that they’re trying out for the first time (or for the first time in a long time), the typical boilerplate that one might see in an app are familiar and reassuring parts of a web page that they expect to see. And so, “simple” means “it handles all those little default chores for you, so you don’t have to”.

These are both valid expressions of “simple”, and both vitally important to audiences we care deeply about. Having simple experiences that anybody can use to start coding productively is a key part of tackling the stress we call "stack anxiety".  But these two versions of simplicity are also mutually exclusive — we can’t make an app that’s “simple” by having fewer lines of distracting metadata while simultaneously making one that’s “simple” by giving you all the default metadata out of the box. We can’t be simple by automatically handling configuration while also being simple by making it easy to customize configuration.

So we took an uncharacteristic path for Glitch: We chose both.

Typically, we’ve had a strong bias toward being opinionated, while offering customization under that hood. That way, we can have a predictable experience that users on the platform can share, and also we can smooth the rough edges of one particular designed experience. But we’re at a stage of maturity and familiarity with the ways that people want to build on Glitch which lets us offer a little more flexibility without losing that ease of use.

We took an uncharacteristic path for Glitch: We chose both.

Thus: “Hello” and “mvp”. (Here, we're using "mvp" to mean "minimum viable product", a common industry term for the simplest version of a project that could possibly do the job.) For each of our common frameworks, we offer each of these two options:

Hello: a starter app that’s set up with all the most popular default configuration settings and boilerplate provided for you out of the box

MVP: a starter app that’s the absolute minimum to get you running, with nothing that you might want to delete and no distractions of anything unfamiliar

These two approaches encompass two different but valuable views of simplicity:

“Do it for me, but let me change it later if I need to”

“Don’t do anything for me except the essentials, so I don’t have any distractions”

We’d love to hear how those choices work for you, and also how you think about what “simple” is for creating. The early response to these choices has been phenomenal. One way we could tell that this approach is working is by looking at examples like these Preact starters, created by a community member, which already follow the implicit convention we’ve been creating. The fact that people in the community can intuit how these kinds of examples should work means that it’s comprehensible enough for people to understand the whole system, not just one individual implementation. And it’s creators in the community who see the benefit.

We’ll be accelerating our creation of opinionated new starter apps in both flavors of “simple”, using the toolkits, frameworks and libraries you’ve asked for most. If you want to be part of creating one, or to see your favorite technology featured, reach out and share your ideas (or example apps!) with us. And if you’ve tried out the new, simpler starter apps, let us know what would make them even more useful for your workflow. We want things to be as simple as possible.

Recently, we launched a whole new set of starter apps on Glitch, with the goal of making it nearly instant to build apps using the latest and greatest frameworks. Naturally, while creating these new experiences, we wanted things to be simple. But that raised an important question:

What kind of simple?

What do we mean by "simple"?

We just launched generated static sites! 🎉 This has been an in-flight feature for a long time, and something I’m really excited to finally see out in the world. There are a lot of moving pieces, but the most important thing to take away is this: generated static sites allow you to run a development process and, when you’re done editing, Glitch will run your `npm run build` script and upload that optimized build to the glitch.me domain every project gets free.

The new starter projects were created for remixing. This bumps up our two templates (hello-express and hello-webpage) to four (website, node, react, eleventy) with opinionated and minimal versions of each. Thinking through the technology choices for each starter and choosing the packages that we were endorsing was an exciting challenge, and we were able to build on the incredible work the open-source community has been doing since we last created new starters. Let’s walk through the new starters and what powers them to give you a better idea of how they’ll help you get started building your idea in seconds.

Our previous Node.js starter, hello-express, was in daily use but starting to fall behind modern Node best practices. Looking at the landscape of Node web servers, there was a clear choice: Fastify. The speed gives us the ability to serve more pages, faster, from the glitch containers. It’s also great how easily extensible Fastify is. Having validation built-in didn’t hurt. We are really excited about what Fastify will allow us to build going forward and how to leverage it for Glitch users; plus, we can build Glitch-specific plugins to interface with our asset management, fully-powered terminal, etc., in the future. There isn’t a lot of boilerplate needed to instantly create an API, so we were able to keep both the opinionated and minimal versions of the Node.js starter fairly straightforward.

We’ve had trouble in the past getting the React development process to be performant on Glitch servers, so solving the speed problem was the #1 priority. Fortunately, our team didn’t have to do much of the work here and instead could rely on Vite to do the heavy lifting. It starts immediately, supports TypeScript and JSX, and has hot module reload enabled by default. That significantly reduced the surface area we needed to build ourselves to support a lightning-fast React workflow.

One way Vite achieves these incredible speeds is by bundling all of your dependencies (in ~glitch-hello-react they are: React, Wouter and react-helmet-async) with ESBuild. ESBuild is an extremely fast JavaScript bundler written in Go. Most likely you aren’t changing your dependencies nearly as much as your code, so it can do that once and only build again when you add a new dependency or upgrade the version.

When you close the editor and stop working on your site, it runs the Vite build process in the background which creates an optimized bundle with Rollup. That means you can take advantage of the wild world of Rollup plugins. We serve this fast production bundle at your free glitch.me domain until you start working in the editor again.

Static site generators are all the rage today, and for good reason. Eleventy cares about speed, ease of use, and—most importantly—the experience of someone browsing your site. When you run the Eleventy build script, it takes all of your files and creates a bundle that can be loaded by those still using AOL dialup. (Please let us know if you are still using AOL dialup!)

The Eleventy starters list is a scoreboard with Lighthouse scores, pushing Eleventy builders to make a performant site that anyone on any connection can view. As website bundles get more and more bloated, Eleventy pushes for as little JavaScript as possible, and uses it only where you need it.

Our  ~glitch-hello-eleventy starter has support for blog posts in Markdown, beautiful styling, and instructions for adding more complexity if you need it. The minimal template was built by the Eleventy team.

Along with support for Eleventy, we’re supporting all of the Eleventy projects that others have built. Want a high-performance blog with image optimizations and analytics? Check out eleventy-high-performance-blog. Something a little more designed, that uses Tailwind CSS and a JS framework (Alpine.js)? Try 11ta.

These are just our starters using the new generated static site functionality. You can apply the same concepts to a Vue site, or Svelte! Any code you can run in the build script that outputs to a build folder can take advantage of this new functionality. Just add this configuration to your package.json:

"glitch": {
  "projectType": "generated_static"
},

That will tell Glitch to treat your project as a generated static site so you have a development environment when you want it, and a production site on your glitch.me domain when you’re done.

So, why not remix one of these starters and create a new project right now? 

Glitch engineer, Keith Kurson, discusses the tech stack and opinions behind our new lineup of Glitch starter apps

A closer look at the new Glitch starter apps

He also serves on the boards of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Data & Society Research Institute, and was formerly a contributing editor of WIRED. He’s been blogging since 1999 and won’t stop telling people about that one time he was on the Desus and Mero late-night show.

Incidents

The Workers Who Keep the Web Safe in an Unsafe World

Animal Crossing Helped Me Get Back to Real Life

New Rules of the Classroom: Remote Teaching in the Age of Covid-19

Better Tech: Why We Need Calm Technology Now More Than Ever

Function with Anil Dash

Open World is a fiction anthology podcast about how science and technology serve as a backdrop for imagining a better future, helping us envision the positive influence that science and tech can play in a real future. 

Open World is produced by Keisha "TK" Dutes and hosted by critically-acclaimed podcaster Rose Eveleth, for Glitch. By speaking to the pressing concerns of our times through love, friendship, community, compassion, and sustainability, the host will help listeners imagine new ways forward into a future that is less scary and more positive, and something we can start working on constructively.  

Open World launches weekly episodes in Spring 2020. Want to contact the show? Email youropenworld@glitch.com.

Open World

Shift Shift Forward is a podcast that showcases everything that makes Glitch the best place to create on the web. We’ll talk to some of our top creators, explore cool apps, and even hear from the people who work at Glitch!

Shift Shift Forward

From idea to code in seconds, build and learn alongside the most creative coders on the Web

Product Updates

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