I recently stripped out Django from my personal site and converted it to a static site, using `staticjinja`.<p>I found myself writing a lot of custom code to get my site going because I wanted to use Jinja templating inside Markdown.<p>Once I was done, I decided to strip out `staticjinja` in favour of my own site generator.<p>And so Jinjabread was born!
Very nice. Like my own stuff, you have an index file and dependent media per folder, which is the only real way to scale out beyond a few dozen pages (my site has… a few more - <a href="https://taoofmac.com/static/graph" rel="nofollow">https://taoofmac.com/static/graph</a>)<p>One suggestion I’d make is to do two passes—one to index all the inter-page links, another to actually render the templates. I do that (and full text search) with SQLite: <a href="https://github.com/rcarmo/sushy/blob/master/sushy/models.py">https://github.com/rcarmo/sushy/blob/master/sushy/models.py</a>
There's a gazillion nice python SSGs but when it comes to advanced stuff like responsive imagrs, i18n or js optimization, you always have to add it yourself.<p>It seems most of these never became fit for use for some bigger website.
Can anyone please explain what happened to the idea of making static sites the old fashioned way?<p>Pure HTML, CSS, and vanilla JS. And a few files organized in a few folders. And upload.<p>Why must even a static site in 2024 require Python, libraries, framework dependencies, build steps, etc?
> <i>Prettify all generated HTML (because why not?)</i><p>..because it makes the files larger? I see why it's useful during dev though. (Great name!)