Static Site Generation

Static site generation is a simple and effective modern way to create web sites. Advantages include reduced complexity, easier compliance, cheaper hosting, amongst other benefits.

The typical CMS driven website works by building each page on-demand, fetching content from a database and running it through a template engine. This means each page is assembled from templates and content on each request to the server.

For most sites this is completely unnecessary overhead and only adds complexity, performance problems and security issues. After all, by far the most websites only change when the content authors or their design team makes changes.

A Static Site Generator takes a different approach and generate all the pages of the website once when there’s actually changes to the site. This means there’s no moving parts in the deployed website. Caching gets much easier, performance goes up and static sites are far more secure.

Our aim here is to figure out how best to integrate these toolchains into the Federation. The idea is that we use the Federation as a store of JSON fragments which can be easily combined in a wide variety of way to provide the data needed by static site generation toolchains to create and publish scaleable web sites.

Seems to me that the best long term way to go is to use Metalsmith and Netlify. However Hugo looks simpler in the short term, and if you are not a Javascript coder then makes it more sense as it is a fast CLI tool written in Go.

MDWiki is an interesting concept of flat file markdown + javascript parsing.

Postachio uses Evernote as the content host and uses the API to render out a website. Publishing content is as simple as tagging a post with #published. Really interesting is the parsing engine they've built to render out media and interactive elements. Using simple "short code" style snippets of text users can embed a variety of content from external sources such as Tweets, Comics, Images, Videos, Slides and Gists.