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by superkuh 2872 days ago
All these static site "generators" seem pretty silly. If you're going to make a static site then just make a few template pages by hand in html then copy and edit them to fill with whatever content.

It works even better if your webserver has server side includes (SSI) turned on. Then you can make header/footer/sidebar/etc templates and just insert them with a line in the page templates.
6 comments
hinkley 2872 days ago
Because one of the things that keeps people engaged in maintaining a website is being able to fiddle with it, and the cost of fiddling with the layout of a truly static site is a lot higher than intuition would suggest.

Because you have to take the odds of making a stupefying, drop-everything mistake on any one page and take it to the nth power. That’s O(c^n). That’s an order of complexity that I haven’t even bothered contemplating in so long that I had to look up the notation.

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ncphillips 2872 days ago
If that works for you, great! But just because you’re not the target audience doesn’t mean it’s silly.

I just have a simple site, but I know I don’t want to write my content in HTML. I just want to write it in Markdown and be on my way. Having yaml frontmatter for metadata and markdown for the body let’s me keep my content separate from my templates.

On the other end of the spectrum are larger organizations like Borisfx.com building large multimedia static sites. Or hell, look at the Forestry.io website and then tell me a few simple templates made by hand would suffice.

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jnbiche 2872 days ago
> It works even better if your webserver has server side includes (SSI) turned on.

If you're trolling, well done. If not, then you're not understanding the concept of the "static" in "static site generators". SSI are inherently dynamic. They run each time the page is viewed (yes, you can use a cache, but the page is still loaded dynamically by the cache server).

> Then you can make header/footer/sidebar/etc templates and just insert them with a line in the page templates.

This is precisely what any static site generator will do, since they all feature template engines.

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kaishiro 2872 days ago
Just out of curiosity, why? Why would I want to do so much more work?
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scrame 2872 days ago
> if your webserver has server side includes (SSI)

are you trolling? shtml setups were nothing but security nightmares on top of bad ideas 20 years ago.

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rjplatte 2872 days ago
This. This and Jekyll. Jekyll is good too.
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