Static Site Meandering
So, I don’t know if I want to say that I am “late” to the game, but I can honestly say that I am glad I have finally moved to a static site generator for my blog posts. Originally when I decided to use static github pages to host my blog, I had decided to be a little bit ambitious and create an entire system using angular and my “limited” frontend skills. However after a few posts and the issues that it raised I decided to move to an existing static site generator.
AND I WAS BLOWN AWAY BY THE CHOICES
Much like any other items on the web there are a number of different static site generators that exist. I wasn’t able to go through and use all of them yet, but I decided I wanted to place the ones that I saw and my very quick experience with these generators. These generators can be broken up by the language that is used in the generator.
NodeJS
- Docpad - This seemed to be the tool of choice for many nodejs devs, very powerful and rich Most likely next candidate
- Wintersmith - “Flexible, minimalistic, multi-platform static site generator” - Site Description
- Harp - Another static frontend generator with an available platform
- Blacksmith - “A generic static site generator built using flatiron, plates, and marked.” - Site Description
- Scotch - “A really classy, dead simple, markdown based, blogging framework for node.js” - Site Description
- Wheat - A blogging framework that has a number of stars, but not recently updated (Over a year ago)
Yeoman Generators
- Armadillo - Generator for easily creating static sites for use with Github pages
- Go Statis - Generator for site scaffolding and Grunt task execution
Ruby
- Jekyll - The core blog tool that is used by a number of sites, including github pages.
- Octopress - Built on top of Jekyll
- Nanoc
- MiddleMan
Python
- Pelican - Light and simple static site generation in python Most likely the candidate after Docpad
- Nikola - Uses doit for fast builds and has plugin capabilities
- Mynt - Attempt at giving advanced CMS support to static blogs
- Blogofile - A generator for those obsessed with blogging
- Frozen-Flask - Taking a flask application and turning it into static content
At this point I am happy with the choice to use Octopress, but I’m also finiky and will “most likely” migrate the blog to another technology in the future. This is mostly because, if I am not learning something new, than what I am doing here ;-).
Resources
There were a few useful sites that I came across while checking these tools out, especially one that pointed to the numerous available python frameworks. Those are listed below.