Overview
Once upon a time, static sites were new and cool, even if very limiting. Changing them was tedious and required a lot of hand-coding or [cough] Dreamweaver design view. Eventually we gave up on static sites and went fully dynamic. Static sites were old and uncool.
Today, however, static sites are cool again and don’t have all the limitations of the static sites of old. There are hundreds of tools available for generating static sites, the most well-known being Jekyll. In this session, we’ll look at how to use and compare Jekyll with several alternative generators built on Ruby (like Jekyll) and Node.js. We’ll examine what types of sites static site generators are useful for and see how each handles things like templating, custom metadata, custom data and more.
Objective
Compare several popular static site engine options to understand what types of sites they are useful for and which solution may best fit your needs.
Target Audience
Any web developer or designer.
Assumed Audience Knowledge
HTML, CSS, JavaScript. Must be comfortable on the command line.
Five things audience members will learn
- What problems static site engines solve
- What types of sites can benefit from a static site engine
- The pros/cons of the Jekyll engine
- The pros/cons of Middleman engine
- The pros/cons of Wintersmith engine
