static site generators

Back in the day, web systems were built with a database at the bottom. When your site needed to feed content to a user who visited or used your site, data was pulled from the database.

A static site generator (SSG) is very different from an old system: there's no database. There are few exploitable areas; security problems are few in comparison with, for example, WordPress.

I love how one can often fairly easily download and reuse a template to make a new website built from a static site generator.

My favourite static site generators:

• Jekyll: my book review site is built from a Jekyll template. I run a site in Swedish based on the ET-Jekyll template.
• Hugo: my CV is built from a Hugo template. Hugo is very fast to build from, but perhaps not the easiest framework (for people like myself). There are a lot of Hugo templates available to build from.
• Astro: this is one of my favourites. My work-portfolio page is built by using an Astro template.
• Zola: it's small, has no dependencies, and is very fast. I used Zola to rebuild my old WordPress blog. It handled nearly 3100 separate files in 85 seconds via Netlify. That's fast. There are loads of themes available.
• Eleventy: this SSG produces builds very quickly and gains more support as time goes by. I've converted my old WordPress blog to an Eleventy blog (which is in serious need of attention). Even better: this digital garden is built by using a combination of Obsidian and the Obsidian Digital Garden plugin; the resulting site that you're reading right now is all Eleventy, baby!
• Antora: uses Asciidoc to create documentation from multiple repositories. Growing rapidly!
• Docusaurus: one of my favourite docs SSGs, in spite of being owned by Facebook. Relatively simple to set up.
• Material for MkDocs: this is a popular docs platform that soon has blog capabilities.