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Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary

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Re: Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary

#171

Post by chrisweekly »

aendruk wrote: post #160
chrisweekly wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please explain how it's "not the right comparison". The parent listed static site generators including Gatsby, Hugo, and Jekyll. I suggested NextJS is a superior option to those 3, because (among many other things) it supports "export" of a fully static, pre-rendered site, which puts it -- unambiguously! -- in the "JAMstack SSG tools" category. So I'm baffled by the downvotes, and your dismissal. What am I missing? T…

https://github.com/vercel/next.js/issues/5054

Thanks, @aendruk -- ok, that issue is a legit reason for some people, in some cases, to prefer a dedicated SSG-only tool over NextJS. But it's not a reason to leave NextJS off the list altogether.

Re: Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary

#172

Post by mhd »

ibraheemdev wrote: post #159
mhd wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that a bit like saying that people who want small web pages wouldn't want to use hugo, as it's a 60 megabyte binary?

No not really. There is a large anti-javascript crowd who avoid anything and everything js based, and frameworks like Gatsby and NextJS require you to interact with js and its tooling.

With those two as the examples, I'd definitely agree with that. I'd regard both as frontend frameworks and I've never heard Next described as a SSG, though, but Gatsby seems to be used as such by fans of reckless overengineering (because I definitely need GraphQL for my blog).

Eleventy would be quite a bit closer to Hugo/Zola, but even then you'd have to use npm/npx to install and run it.

Re: Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary

#173

Post by hexanal »

regus wrote: post #7

I though this was about the wedding registry site at first. Anyway, I liked this line from the Github: > Hugo gets ehh for the template engine because while it is probably the most powerful template engine in the list (after Jinja2) it personally drives me insane, to the point of writing my own template engine and static site generator. Yes, this is a bit biased. This seems to be the life cycle of static site generat…

I'm doing the same thing but I wonder if I should even write something about it, hehe

Seeing all those HN posts about new static website generators and then your post makes me think that the important thing here is the concept of it, rather than specific implementations. I kind of like the multitude of options because it tells me that there's demand for that stuff, and we're all trying to find the most elegant solutions.

As a webdev, I'm happy to admit I'm not a programmer. I just dump some data in HTML templates, sprinkle some CSS and JS, while trying to give devs, editors, and users the tools to manage/navigate a website without much pain and suffering.

Re: Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary

#174

Post by hexanal »

bookmarkable wrote: post #99

My input as a former technologist turned marketing guy over the years - where is a decent SSG (perhaps like Zola) with page building drag and drop tools like a Wix or a Squarespace? I'd love to move our site off of Wix - and have full control when needed and work offline before publishing pages - but inevitably you dive back into code or the guts of database queries once you leave these WYSIWYG tools. Between Wix and…

Everybody seems to be trying that right now!

I haven't formally studied computer science nor programming, so it's very hard for me, but I wanted to build a set of tools that would eventually allow for what I call "block-stitching": a UI that mixes the data, its editor (form fields), and its destination template.

The idea is to be able to quickly build a web page using nestable components, and being able to export/import the structured data, in as many formats as possible.

But since I hardly ever interact with other devs, I might have missed similar projects which are mature enough already? (I just like to build my own crap, it's fun)

Re: Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary

#175

Post by remexre »

southerntofu wrote: post #161
remexre wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, I got frustrated with Zola, ended up maintaining a couple patches, and eventually ended up writing my own (ad hoc, not generally usable) SSG...

Hello, i'm curious about your patches. Do you believe they could be useful for other people? Would you be willing to help upstream them? I'm happy you coded your own SSG, and if you're happy with it it's cool, but maybe your painpoints with zola are valid for other people as well and we could try to fix them for everyone :)

Already tried; patch that lead to the fork was "not adding this feature," sadly.

Re: Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary

#176

Post by gadders »

kam wrote: post #97
gadders wrote: post #16

What is stopping someone writing an offline GUI for a static site generator? I think that would help a bit with non-technical adoption.

https://getpublii.com/ , though it would be nicer if it were built on one of the more popular static site generators instead of reinventing that wheel.

I guess if you did it right, you could be static site generator agnostic, or at least cover a variety of popular ones. What would change? Commands to send, directory structure, flavour of templates/markdown?

Re: Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary

#177

Post by ci5er »

mbreese wrote: post #133
kcartlidge wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know the feeling. In my very meta case I get frustrated with my own SSGs , so every time I start learning a new language an SSG is one of my two standard projects to give a frame of comparison. I now have my own SSGs written in C#, Go, Node, Python, Ruby, and PHP. It's totally ridiculous, I know. Yak shaving and shiny to the nth degree.

That makes a lot of sense to me. It used to be that writing a blog engine was the "Hello World" of a new language or framework. So, it makes sense that a SSG would be a good non-trivial project to use to learn or understand the pros/cons of a language.

I prefer ray-tracers (or other rendering or physics engines), maybe because I'm old or have nothing to blog about.
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