The reason I like static site generators so much is because it allows me to treat my website as a program that outputs a website. Take some posts in whichever format you prefer, write a program to parse them as a tree of HTML nodes, insert them into templates for HTML pages, Atom feeds, etc. It's all just plain text code and markup, no stateful database with a dynamic web application in front doing everything.
Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing
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Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing
#32I 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…
That page needs a proofread! Hope it's not causing you to lose conversions there. Nice and snappy though, seems like you did a good job with the generator.
Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing
#33I've been using static site generators a lot for client work over the last two years. I started off with Jekyll, but unless you are having under 100 pages, the build process gets painfully slow (trust me, I have micro-optimised).
I've since started using http://gohugo.io
It's lightning fast with 1000s of pages, and quite easy to pick up.
Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing
#34I would be equally interested if the article was titled "Why Static Website Generators Are Awesome". They are not the "next big thing", they've been around for years.
The next big thing doesn't mean they are new though, just that they will be the next thing à la mode.
Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing
#35I am working on Open Source Static Website Generator/Manager for College Professors to create/manage course webpages. Its actually a Desktop App which runs on windows, linux & Mac and can directly push the webpages created to Github-Pages, SFTP Server. Do check out the project at https://github.com/navya/Kalam .
Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing
#36I've been a fan of static websites for a long while now. In addition to page load issues, they also more or less completely solve the Slashdot effect (aka the Reddit Hug Of Death, these days). A competently-configured Nginx server on a 512mb VPS, serving static-only content, will handle ridiculous amounts of traffic without flinching. Ever since a front-page mention on BoingBoing took down my feature film BloodSpell'…
Do you - or anyone - have stats about the possible traffic demands of Slashdot/Reddit/HN front page stardom?
I'm very much in the Nginx/static camp, but it would be useful to know how bad the spikes can get.
Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing
#37The thing that always pulls me back to wordpress is the ease of creation and hosting. Drag an image into your text, and pop it's uploaded, hosted, and linked to. Write something in the interface and bam it's online and reliable. Every static site generator I've played with (And there have been TONS), solves 80% of the problem.
I'd love an app that gave me that ease of hosting and creation and generated a static site from there (hook it up to an S3 bucket or something). I'd pay for sure.
Currently I'm using Nginx w/ SSIs for lightly dynamic sites. Works well enough and is very very simple.
Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing
#38The only problem I feel this really solves is caching, and for that specific problem, generating static pages may be a (work-aroundy) solution to consider, but in general I don't think static website generators are going to be the next big thing... When you look at page speed, not much of the slow-down is from servers delivering pages, but browsers having to digest HTML/CSS/IMG/JS I guess it all depends on what you a…
> When you look at page speed, not much of the slow-down is from servers delivering pages, but browsers having to digest HTML/CSS/IMG/JS
I think both can be to blame, although you're right that JS load is becoming more and more of an issue. I used to work on a site that used Joomla and literally hundreds of separate database queries were executed for each page request. That is going to put a huge strain on server-delivery time, and it's unsurprising that this site couldn't handle much of a load before falling over.
Static pages are really so much faster than any dynamically-generated site I've seen. Still, I agree about JS - it's possibly time for a 'back to basics' approach on client-side scripting akin to the static page revolution that has occurred on the server-side. At the very least, I think the 'many scripts, many sources' issue needs to be resolved.
Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing
#39I'm still looking for a static site generator that's as easy to use as Wordpress (so with a UI, not markdown). Anyone know of something that fits the bill?
Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing
#40... because Javascript and external APIs can now do so much.
If I can do everything with JS on the visitors browser, why not host some shell HTML on S3 and never worry about a server? Maybe hit AWS Lambda if need be for one specific thing? Dunno. The age of the do everything server seems to be coming to a close.