Static site generator
Flat HTML is fast. (The hidden irony is that most modern websites have more JavaScript than HTML!)
Databases, complex application servers, and enterprise architectures can be slow; or at least expensive by the time they are fully provisioned, staffed, cached, and tuned!
Enter "static site generators". If the content you have is not 'user generated' and is not 'real-time', then a static site generator is possibly the right solution. In 2013, using Jekyll, the fundraising team for President Barack Obama raised $250M using a static site[1]
At eQuality Technology we built a website in a day using GitHub pages and Jekyll
The Generators[edit | edit source]
At the time of this writing, there are 450 static site generators to choose from. Blosxom is a Perl application for blogging that was created 15 years ago and follows the same principle as the spate of projects that appeared in the 2014 timeframe. Today, the most popular is Jekyll [2], because it is connected to GitHub, and GitHub has become the development center of the web.
Simplicity[edit | edit source]
For most static site generator projects, the goal is simplicity. However, there are problems to cope with: What if you need a form (user generated content, interaction, and a database or some storage method)? Static site generators are not the solution for every problem. But with some careful exploration of the options out there, you can probably find a good use case to add one or more of these static site generators to your toolkit.
Performance[edit | edit source]
For us, we wanted to create a marketing site for a new product, and didn't need the complexity of a full framework or CMS. And we didn't want to get bogged down in the complexity either. Whereas our regular Drupal website takes an astonishingly bad 5 seconds to load (we'll improve it... "The cobbler's kids always need shoes"), our documentation site for QualityBox loads in 0.664s Head over to https://qualitybox.us to check it out and let us know if you like it.
