There are many reasons and options to choose a static site generator, but the main reasons are speed and security. Speed because it can allow more control over the content you only load what is really required without additional server side content, for security not having a database that can be compromised and security updates to apply, reduce the attack vectors and the administration work.
There are many options for static site generators created on diferent languages like:
- Jekyll (Ruby) - jekyllrb.com
- Hugo (Go) - gohugo.io
- Hexo (Nodejs)- hexo.io
- Octopress (Ruby) - octopress.org
- Pelican (Python) - blog.getpelican.com
Although those static site generators are implemented on different languagues all use Markdown. Markdown is a powerful writing tool allows you to write rich content for the web far faster than almost any other method and is well supported by many editors and IDE like Visual Studio Code, Atom, Webstorm, Sublime Text and others.
Another advantage is more control over the updates to the site with version control systems like Git which means the process of creating and updating sites is much more integrated with the developer workflow.
My blog was previously running on wordress, now is build with Hugo, tracked with git on Gitlab and server with Nginx, SSL by letsencrypt and cached with Cloudflare server is a KVM VPS running Linux Fedora 27
I’ll share the setup in my next post.
some references:
- python html2text
- online tool to convert html to markdown
- markdown guide
- python static site generators
- visual studio code markdown support
- sublimetext markdown
- atom markdown
- atom markdown writer
- atom markdown preview