This sat in draft for way too long whoops
To celebrate a "working site" milestone in my driver SSG project, I decided to take a look back at my Static Site Generators post. It got a lot of traffic at the time!! Thank you again to everyone who read & commented on it, y'all made my week <3
As one might have expected, talking about SSGs online had a "360 noscope nerdsnipe headshot" effect, so across multiple platforms I have amassed a grand collection of Static Site Generators, based on peoples' mentions/recommendations, to gaze upon at our leisure. Sure it's not as grand a collection as Awesome Static Generators ("all 148 of them!") or Jamstack ("all 377 of them!") or staticsitegenerators.net ("all 484 of them!"), but I think it's impressive nonetheless.
To avoid bias, I shall order them alphabetically, and give reviews to all:
- 11ty: Embroiled in controversy over their acquisition by Font Awesome & their recent rename to "Build Awesome", but beloved by a strong community. One of the classic Javascript SSGs.
- bai by Kayla: Seems like a custom templating program, written in Rust, which can be used as part of an SSG? neat
- Bilo by domm: Perl! Poking around the codebase it's honestly pretty readable. Very much a "tool-for-one-person" deal tho
- blogserver by Bert: Instead of just producing files, this then loads produced files as part of a Go binary, and serves directly from loaded memory that way. Looks like it uses a Make-like system called redo to efficiently produce changes, TIL about that looks cool.
- flora by Nick: What a cute Ruby DSL! Be careful not to mix it up with flower by Jynn, that one uses a Clojure DSL instead.
- her.esy.fun by Yann: Makefile + org-mode, a classic pairing
- ikiwiki by Joey: Is a wiki a blog? I guess it sort of is, considering icefox's blog is a wiki. Anyways I like the name, it is a bit of complex Perl however
- luasmith by Jared: I was thinking about using a Lua DSL for my project, but didn't because I like Javascript more. Pretty cool to see just how much can be done with just Lua, and also how many libraries there are for it!
- mk12/blog by mk12: Zig, designed for speed, includes a custom Markdown & MathML parser?? pretty awesome honestly
- md2blog by Jared (same person as before): Deno binary, "zero config" opinionated setup, another classic type of personal project. This came before luasmith.
- Nanoc by Denis: Ruby! Tho this one uses more standard HTML templates. Seems like good docs too.
- nextgen by Florian: Purpose-built generator where most all the logic is written in Rust, again highly-opinionated to site layout/features. If Javascript SSGs are classic then Rust SSGs are modern :3
- riki by Lars: An attempt at re-writing ikiwiki in Rust. I like Rust more than Perl so I want this to succeed...!!
- susam.net by Susam: Common Lisp!! Specifically, Steel Bank. Seems like this author has re-written their static site generation multiple times, where this is the latest. I tried to read it but it sure is Lisp yep.
- tumblelog by John: Both Python & Perl versions of the same program, kept in feature parity?? They say it hasn't been done before now. Interesting concept to use Markdown files as the basis for templating instead of HTML; I guess makes sense given technically it's a subset, and given the intended use of the program (microblogging).
- YOcaml: It's always nice to see OCaml being used for real code <3 Seems like a pretty extensive tutorial too!
- Zensical: An offshoot project created as part of the whole MkDocs fiasco. Was plugged to me in a comment on Mastodon, seems very corporate somehow.
- Zine by Loris: It's all Zig!! The configuration, frontmatter, & templates all being Zig-inspired is a neat touch :3
I had a lot of fun cataloging these small corners of the internet. Really makes me aware of just how many other people are out there, also doing cool stuff. Hope this was as inspiring for you as it was for me!