Researching a Static Site Generator
The research I’ve done and found for a static site generation system
I’ll start out by saying that for years I’ve been a proponent of Wordpress. It’s an end user friendly system that allows for a tremendous amount of freedom for users who might not know all the ins and outs of how to host and manage a website’s back-end. There is nothing wrong with that. It’s made it very easy for clients to publish blog posts with minimal technical know-how.
I’ve gone down the rabbit hole of a static site generator after really taking a look at what I do on my own websites, which I’ve also run using Wordpress powered systems, and the results were…not much. I don’t do anything that is considered dynamic on my sites. They’re really just a series of static pages that don’t change unless there is a text edit or something needing to be added to that particular post or page.
So that brings me to what that means.
A static site generator, is simply an application framework that can be quickly and easily used to generate all those HTML files that you may have been writing in the past manually or that WordPress’s WYSIWYG editor has been creating for you. What makes it really great though is they require absolutely no huge amount of running resources on a server. No database, no logins etc. Just clean simple web pages.
When I started this journey I was a bit overwhelmed by all the possible ways to do it so I narrowed down my focus by picking where I wanted the final pages to live and see what they supported.
Some quick and easy options that are very low cost or maybe even free depending on your usage, and I’ll get to these later again when we reach that point.
There are a number of systems that can be used, which I will list but just a few here but for the purposes of these entries I will be focusing on Hexo as that’s what this site is being built on.
| Name | Website | Tagline |
|---|---|---|
| Hexo | [https://l.mr7.one/hexo] | A fast, simple & powerful blog framework |
| Jekkyl | [https://l.mr7.one/jekkyl] | Transform your plain text into static websites and blogs. |
| Hugo | [https://l.mr7.one/hugo] | Hugo is one of the most popular open-source static site generators. |
This is where things start to get exciting. My next entry will be on the First Steps on getting your journey started and some of the hurdles you’ll have to consider, beyond just picking a framework to build with.
—MrDigital
[]: https://l.mr7.one/hexo
[]: https://l.mr7.one/jekkyl
[]: https://l.mr7.one/hugo