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Genuine question, not passive aggression. Why do static site generators always revolve around blogs? Blogs are around, sure, but they're a bit old-hat now, rig
by sago 11y ago
Genuine question, not passive aggression. Why do static site generators always revolve around blogs?
Blogs are around, sure, but they're a bit old-hat now, right? There are other ways to arrange content. I've got my own single-file Python static site generator, which could handle a blog, I guess, but it would seem odd to crown that one application. Is it historical, from Jekyll? Or is blogging the overwhelming use-case for static sites?
- geraldbauer 11y agoFYI: I've put together a showcase for static sites [1] at Planet Jekyll. If you browse the listing (a static site itself ;-) you will find project sites, online books, and much more (than just blogs). [1] http://planetjekyll.github.io/showcase http://planetjekyll.github.io/showcase
- Poiesis 11y agoMind sharing the link for your static site generator?
- sago 11y agoThanks for the interest, but it is just a kind of personal hack thing. Just feed pages through markdown and jinja templates.
- nkrisc 11y agoWhile I can only speculate, I would imagine that blogs or blog-like sites are not only the majority use case for static site generators, they also make for a simple and relatable example for demonstrating the capabilities of the generator.
- Touche 11y agoGreat question, I'm not sure why media sites aren't all statically generated, would be much more economical if nothing else. Ads can still be dynamically loaded on the client, but content that never changes; why is that in a database?
- dkuntz2 11y agoWhen you've got multiple authors of varying technical skill, it's probably significantly easier to give them a nice web server backend to interact with than it is to try and teach them how to use the generator.
- Touche 11y agoThe backend is irrelevant to the interface the author uses.
- Killswitch 11y agoBut if the author needs to add content, they need to use the generator, if they're using an interface, they're no longer on a static site.
- icebraining 11y agoThe interface could simply re-generate the static files on save. Movable Type works like this by default.
- Touche 11y agoNo, they're in an admin application, which has no reason to be the same "thing" as the site you're authoring. This is what I'm talking about, people are so engrained in the way things currently work that can't see obvious things like this. It's code, you can do whatever you want.
- narrowrail 11y agoI think making a desktop application using electron as the basis, and embedding one of the SSGs would be interesting. Are you aware of anything like that?
- xtrumanx 11y ago
- dkuntz2 11y agoIt probably has to do with two things: who's building it; and that blogs are both generally non-dynamic and updated frequently.
- kylemathews 11y agoGatsby author here: Blogs are basically the TODO app of the static site generator world. They're a simple well-understood pattern that let's someone easily evaluate a new framework.
- CJefferson 11y agoI do find this annoying -- I use pelican but I'm trying to force it into a non-bloggy layout. You can do it, but it's always pushing a little against default behaviour.
- frandroid 11y agoBecause "river of content" is still the dominant way of consuming content on the web (Facebook, Twitter), and "blog" is the most popular shorthand for this concept for static sites.