Hey, just wanted to drop this here. It’s a technical follow-up to The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Static Sites which was reasonably popular, and explains the components of a static site’s stack.
Just last week I decided to try a different tech than I’m used to to run up a site. I did a little research then searched GitHub and found Hugo. I read the Hugo docs, followed their beginners guide and… Didn’t get fucking anywhere. Their docs are out of date, the examples are out of date. It looked so promising but my brain works best when referencing examples and when I couldn’t even get those to work, well, I don’t have time for that these days.
If anyone knows another static site generator with up to date documentation and an easy to run up example please let me know.
Hexo has been working great for me. I found the documentation great as well.
I must sound like an old fossil but I just use windows notepad to build any basic sites that don’t need like a shopping cart or anything complex.
The advantage of static site generators is you have your template and it’s filled by the data for each page. It’s generally very simple and intuitive.
The problem with doing it your way is if you need to change a common element you have to edit every page. Instead of just changing the template.
Markdown to html just works so well as all your pages are structured the same.
I use PHP to generate anything repetitive. With that and CSS it’s pretty easy to make site wide changes.