static site generator

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Static site generators are programs that take a set of flat text files on disk and transforms them into a set of static html files ready to be served by a standard web server, or some variation of this example.

Advantages

• Long term maintenance advantages
• Archival ready html output
• Can be hosted on any webserver
• No "moving parts"; nothing to break
• Easy to get started
• Source files can be edited on an operating system. Usually its just text files!
• Generators are typically fairly simple programs to write and modify
• Lots of existing options; Few are better than most
• No database-antipattern
• Fewer security vulnerabilities with static HTML+CSS
• ...

Disadvantages

• Most SSGs are written as CLI programs and are difficult for non-technical people to learn
• Can be difficult to install due to the use of programming language package managers
• Most SSGs don't scale well with large data sets
• ...

Popular and Documented SSGs

• Crotal
• Docpad
• Hakyll
• Harp
• hugo
• Jekyll
• Pelican
• Wintersmith
• Middleman
• Eleventy
• ...

IndieWeb Examples

• rascul is writing his own site generator for https://rascul.io.
• bear is writing and using Hakkan.
• Emma Kuo is writing and using Skein.
• Daniel Goldsmith is using Hugo and writing nanopub, a micropub-endpoint for SSGs
• AJ Jordan is writing Stratic and lazymention (Webmention for static sites)
• Amit Gawande is using Hugo and posting with micro.blog via a micropub-endpoint
• Add yourself here… (see this for more details)

IndieWebCamp Sessions

• 2014/static-sites
• 2015/static
• 2015/Static Websites
• 2015/Edinburgh/static
• 2015/Brighton/static
• 2016/Nuremberg/static
• 2017/Nuremberg/static
• 2019/Düsseldorf/ssgcms

See Also

• static site
• static site cms
• projects
• static hosting
• https://github.com/strugee/lazymention app that can handle webmention sending and websub hub pings when notified of new deploy
• webmention.io receiver for static sites - https://github.com/martymcguire/morris - bake webmention data during build
• https://twitter.com/qubyte/status/1031553113583493122
  • "And if you're a web dev like me, it's extremely satisfying to roll a little static site generator and play with things like microformats and webmentions." @qubyte August 20, 2018
• Introduction to SSG from 2015
• List of SSG