An introduction to static site generators

Small example: at videolan.org (7,3M VU) we have a php website that is generated (by a custom generator) into static html with a svn/git post-commit hook. It works perfectly fine and can manage huge loads...<p>I kind of disagree with the OP for a few reason:<p>&#62; You can’t update your website unless you’re at your computer where the static site generator software is installed<p>We use svn/git post-commit hooks for this. The generation is done server-side.<p>&#62; You can’t have local comments, pingbacks, non-google site wide search, contact us forms (without some dynamic code etc)<p>True, but for example, we have some dynamic pages for forms.<p>To me, this only make sense if you don't have many interactions (comments) and if the website isn't updated 300 times/day. But it is a nice solution.<p>&#60;/my_story&#62;

Marco Arment (co-founder of tumblr, creator of instapaper) is also working on a static site generator called Second Crack <a href="http://www.marco.org/secondcrack" rel="nofollow">http://www.marco.org/secondcrack</a> . What sounds cool about that is that it has a friendly dynamic backend that generates a static site. He's trying to get the best of both worlds.

The most strange (but interesting) static site generator I’ve ever seen is: <a href="http://mearie.org/about/mearie#technical-detail" rel="nofollow">http://mearie.org/about/mearie#technical-detail</a> . It uses Apache’s mod_negotiation very well to support internationalized contents. (That site provides English, Korean and Japanese version for most contents.) You can read the source code from here: <a href="http://hg.mearie.org/mearie.org/current" rel="nofollow">http://hg.mearie.org/mearie.org/current</a>

A few months ago the NY Times wrote an article about how they did static generation for their election results mini-site. The HN discussion was here: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2025611" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2025611</a>

I use pyBlosxom in the same way: <a href="http://happy.cat/blog/Blogging-with-pyBlosxom-2010-01-20.html" rel="nofollow">http://happy.cat/blog/Blogging-with-pyBlosxom-2010-01-20.htm...</a>

Two other major advantages of static site generators.<p>First, security, particularly compared to wordpress.<p>Second, you can host the resulting HTML anywhere, for instance, a subdirectory of a web server you don't want to write a blog engine for. my corporate site is powered by Nitrogen (Erlang) and I just whipped out a Jekyll template this week for the blog we're adding - then we can host the blog under that site without having to go write a blog framework in Erlang.

Also recommend Hakyll! <a href="http://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/" rel="nofollow">http://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/</a><p>The "configuration" is a Haskell program that uses the Hakyll library as a DSL.<p>I use it for my home page: <a href="http://chrisdone.com/" rel="nofollow">http://chrisdone.com/</a><p>Sauce: <a href="https://github.com/chrisdone/chrisdone-homepage/blob/master/hakyll.hs" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/chrisdone/chrisdone-homepage/blob/master/...</a>

For anyone who's interested, I've been working on a static site generator called Bolt (<a href="http://usebolt.com/" rel="nofollow">http://usebolt.com/</a>), which is more like a Sinatra clone which outputs static HTML (rather than being aimed at bloggers) giving you a lot of flexibility!

I recently finished converting my main site (personalmba.com) to Jekyll from Wordpress.<p>Once I learn enough Sinatra to build a user creation / login system similar to Wishlist Member, I'll never use Wordpress again.

I chose nanoc over jekyll because it has support for haml, sass and other stuff. Webgen has similar flexibility, the latest version has a web interface to edit the markdown files and generate the site.

I assume "GitHup Pages" is meant to be "GitHub Pages".

fixed. thank you.