CategoryGenerators

March 13, 2018 — Even if you don’t use any client-side JavaScript at all to build a site, it doesn’t mean you have to give up on the idea of building with components. Learn how to build a static site with the help of an HTML preprocessor. In this article, Chris Coyier will take a walk through a site he built recently using this technique. He used CodePen Projects to build it, which offers Nunjucks as a preprocessor, which was perfectly up for the job. Read more…

April 21, 2017 — The beauty of Jekyll is in its simplicity. While WordPress can match many of the features of Jekyll, it often comes at the cost of complexity through extra plugins or infrastructure. In this article, Mike Neumegen will take on the role of a web developer building a website for a fictional law firm. WordPress is an obvious choice for a website like this, but is it the only tool we should consider? Let’s look at a completely different way of building a website, using Jekyll. Read more…

August 2, 2016 — Static site generators are wonderful, even though they have to deal with work for which they weren’t initially created for. Learn how to provide aid wherever necessary for them to become more productive than ever. Read more…

July 13, 2016 — The benefits of UI design systems are now well known. They lead to more cohesive, consistent user experiences. They speed up your team’s workflow, allowing you to launch more stuff while saving huge amounts of time and money in the process. They establish a common vocabulary between disciplines, resulting in a more collaborative and constructive workflow. They make browser, device, performance, and accessibility testing easier. And they serve as a solid foundation to build upon over time, helping your organization to more easily adapt to the ever-shifting web landscape. This article provides a detailed guide to building and maintaining atomic design systems with Pattern Lab 2. Read more…

February 23, 2016 — Was there a tool Steve Hickey could use to help people quickly model content in a platform-agnostic manner and simultaneously build an artifact that was ideal for communicating intent to a client or team? There are some great further features that can established by digging into the Jekyll docs in more detail, but what we have here are the basics of a good content modeling prototype: the ability to define different types of objects, the attributes attached to those objects, and IDs that allow us to call specific objects from anywhere. Best of all, the whole system is simple and human-readable, and outputs plain HTML for use elsewhere if necessary. Read more…

November 16, 2015 — In this article, Mathias Biilmann Christensen will look at four popular static website generators — Jekyll, Middleman, Roots, Hugo — in far more detail. This should give you a great starting point for finding the right one for your project. A lot of other ones are out there, but the ones Mathias chose for this article represent the different trends that dominate the landscape today. While static websites have been around since the beginning of the Internet, modern static website generation is just getting started. Use, share, improve, enjoy. Welcome to modern static website technology! Read more…

November 2, 2015 —

At StaticGen, our open-source directory of static website generators, we’ve kept track of more than a hundred generators for more than a year now, and we’ve seen both the volume and popularity of these projects take off incredibly on GitHub during that time, going from just 50 to more than 100 generators and a total of more than 100,000 stars for static website generator repositories. Influential design-focused companies such as Nest and MailChimp now use static website generators for their primary websites. Vox Media has built a whole publishing system around Middleman. Carrot, a large New York agency and part of the Vice empire, builds websites for some of the world’s largest brands with its own open-source generator, Roots. And several of Google’s properties, such as “A Year In Search” and Web Fundamentals, are static.

Static websites are hardly new, going all the way back to the beginning of the web. So, why the sudden explosion in interest? What’s up? Why now?

August 1, 2014 — The simplicity of Jekyll’s theming layer and writing workflow is fantastic; however, setting up the website takes a lot longer than expected. It isn’t for every project. The biggest disadvantage of a static website generator is that incorporating dynamic server-side functionality becomes difficult. Jekyll’s strength is its simplicity and minimalism, giving you just what you need to create a content-focused website that doesn’t need much dynamic user interaction — and no more. This makes it perfect for your blog and portfolio and also worth considering for a simple client website. In this article, Barry Clark will walk you through the quickest way to set up a Jekyll powered blog, how to avoid common problems with using Jekyll, and much more. Read more…