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Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

smashingmagazine.com

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Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#21

Post by Marazan »

AnkhMorporkian wrote: post #16

You know what I've always wanted, but my searches have led me to believe that it (inexplicably) doesn't exist? I want a simple site generator. I don't want markdown, I don't want a fancy templating engine. I want some simple templating system that takes in normal HTML and generates pages from simple templates I define. I want to shove in some arbitrary HTML and have it spit out a site using some base templates. To th…

A fancy templating engine can be a simple templating engine by just not using all the features.

Statsi Site Generation is one of those thing s where I think Not Invented Here is a legitimate point of view. Your exact use case is never going to match the exact use case of other people so you should roll your own rather than trying to customize an existing solution.

Plus writing a SSG is super fun, it's like the most 1960's thing you can do (Input Docs->Processing->Output Docs)

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#22

Post by bryanlarsen »

AnkhMorporkian wrote: post #16

You know what I've always wanted, but my searches have led me to believe that it (inexplicably) doesn't exist? I want a simple site generator. I don't want markdown, I don't want a fancy templating engine. I want some simple templating system that takes in normal HTML and generates pages from simple templates I define. I want to shove in some arbitrary HTML and have it spit out a site using some base templates. To th…

Jekyll (and probably most other generators) works fine with HTML, you don't have to use markdown.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#23

Post by gavinmyers »

AnkhMorporkian wrote: post #16

You know what I've always wanted, but my searches have led me to believe that it (inexplicably) doesn't exist? I want a simple site generator. I don't want markdown, I don't want a fancy templating engine. I want some simple templating system that takes in normal HTML and generates pages from simple templates I define. I want to shove in some arbitrary HTML and have it spit out a site using some base templates. To th…

Have you tried Middleman (mentioned in the article)? I've used it for a few years and found it incredibly simple.

https://middlemanapp.com/

I built a very simple admin-interface with it,

input: https://github.com/lms-io/scormfu-admin/blob/master/source/i...

output: https://github.com/lms-io/scormfu-admin/blob/master/build/in...

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#25

Post by AnkhMorporkian »

gavinmyers wrote: post #23
AnkhMorporkian wrote: post #16

You know what I've always wanted, but my searches have led me to believe that it (inexplicably) doesn't exist? I want a simple site generator. I don't want markdown, I don't want a fancy templating engine. I want some simple templating system that takes in normal HTML and generates pages from simple templates I define. I want to shove in some arbitrary HTML and have it spit out a site using some base templates. To th…

Have you tried Middleman (mentioned in the article)? I've used it for a few years and found it incredibly simple. https://middlemanapp.com/ I built a very simple admin-interface with it, input: https://github.com/lms-io/scormfu-admin/blob/master/source/i... output: https://github.com/lms-io/scormfu-admin/blob/master/build/in...

That looks exactly like what I was envisioning. Thank you so much!

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#28

Post by spjwebster »

Every time static generation rears its head, I'm reminded of Yahoo!'s ... unique... take.

Back in 2006 when I worked for Yahoo!, and they had a CMS / template management system called Jake that statically generated templates for the PHP-based frontend servers to evaluate at request time. The idea was that you put as much of your logic as possible into the template generation layer, leaving the request-time logic to handle the stuff that changed request by request.

Now, that all sounds quite reasonable, but the two layers were written in different languages. The pre-template-generation logic was written as inline Perl (plus a little custom syntax, because why not), while the dynamic frontend logic was written in PHP. Perl was frequently used to generate chunks of PHP code to be executed by the frontend servers, and sometimes this PHP code wrote chunks of inline JavaScript. To say that debugging said JS was fun would be an understatement.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#29

Post by manishsharan »

I host my company's web site on AWS Cloudfront using my homemade static website publisher which minifies my JavaScript's ,css and html and gzips them before pushing to Cloudfront . The pages load fast but the downside is making changes to page like fixing typos is not as simple but that probably an issue with my generatorvas well as Cloudfront cache configuration. I don't use Jekyll or Hyde or other static publishers because I wanted to write one in clojure and I figured I could write one in clojure faster than what it would take me to learn jekyll etc. You can check out and (critique) my website by visiting https://www.videocloudmanager.com. I run business video hosting service.
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