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by themodelplumber 4420 days ago
It seems like there is a gigantic living, breathing ecosystem made of these SSGs now, with Jekyll being the favorite for people who are inclined to seek out the one that has the most stuff written about it, or the largest community. Can't say I disagree with that method of selecting software, either.

When I found out about Hugo yesterday, after comparing a list of others which must have been a few weeks too old to include the latest hotness, I almost collapsed at my keyboard. Developed in Go, distributed as a binary. Hokay. So now you can pretty much narrow your choice down to the language, then the software architecture, then the amount of activity on Github, then the license, then the corresponding "ideal website as created by SSG package X" output, then the attitudes of the authors on your favorite social networks, and finally you can probably look up the authors' girlfriends too (don't do that) and compare by girlfriend.

On top of that, the static output is dropped into gigantic pools of resources that can scale to an unimaginable degree, can probably handle hundreds of DDOSes at a time, and they probably all validate without so much as a yellow flag. Oh and if you want you can use this tool to write an API, or if you want you can just not build a site with it, because it includes a game of Nibbles which is also static in some funny way, or whatever.

It's amazing and absolutely ridiculous at the same time. In some ways it's an almost pornographic exploitation of process that cares approximately 0% about content. But it's also a huge display of generosity and demonstrates some very serious attention to craft.

1 comments

Yep. This is a good blog post by Development Seed about their static-only website approach: http://developmentseed.org/blog/2012/07/27/build-cms-free-we...