Can we just take a moment to appreciate that Static Site Generators are FUCKING AWESOME.
Jekyll, Pelican, Hugo, Sphinx, MkDocs, Zensical. Whatever, pick one; they're a honkin' great idea. One of the better ideas we've had in the last 20 years.
@xahteiwi I don't know, what a static site generator is and at this point I'm (almost) too afraid to ask.
@stuartyeates but, what you're describing is called a website and can be done by anyone with a text editor.. What's with the generator? @xahteiwi
@walsonde The SSG gives you all the flexibility of a CMS, including the ability to flip one little thing in your theme in one place and then have the entire site reflect that change. Paired with Git it gives you versioning and rollback, plus you can build all the quality checks you desire into a CI pipeline. And you can write everything in Markdown, which is far and away the best balance between expressivity and simplicity among all the markup languages out there.
@walsonde But you need no database, no caching daemon, no server-side scripting engine, and no interpreter to actually *host* your site. Makes the site itself blazing fast, portable to any hosting provider of your choosing, and dead cheap.
Oct 21, 2026, 8:28 PM@rainer #notSureIfSarcasm, so if you argue comments are bad and getting rid of them is a good idea, then that has some merit — but if you *do* want comments, there's options. Go check out what @jwildeboer does.
Oct 21, 2026, 8:34 PM@xahteiwi Specifically https://jan.wildeboer.net/2023/02/Jekyll-Mastodon-Comments/ :) @rainer @stuartyeates @walsonde@antifa.style
Oct 21, 2026, 8:42 PM@rainer May I remind you that on the vast majority of websites that allow commenting, an account *on that site* is mandatory to be able to comment?
Oct 21, 2026, 8:52 PM@rainer ... and Akismet filters out 99.5% of incoming comments.
@rainer @xahteiwi @jwildeboer @stuartyeates unless you want to allow anonymous comment, you would need an account somewhere on a cemmwnting solution.
It could be on the same website you read from, a 3rd party solution like disqus, or activitypub/mastodon.
I would argue that mastodon is pretty good as it is federated, no?
@dolanor @rainer @xahteiwi @jwildeboer do you get to pick an instance with a righteous moderation policy, or will an account of one of the horrid ones do?
Oct 21, 2026, 9:47 PM@rainer @xahteiwi @stuartyeates @walsonde
You can still have comments, but it has to be done via client-side scripting and some kind of comment service.
@xahteiwi @stuartyeates so basically what I've been looking and asking for for years, so I don't have to do anything by hand like the idiot that I am. I didn't know that has a name. I just was looking in the wrong place. 😁
@walsonde @stuartyeates @xahteiwi The generator part is that most of your content is written in stuff like MD files and then you have templates for the layout and such. So it's much like using PHP or whatever but instead of the server generating the output on request you do it as a compile step and then upload the generated crap to however you serve it up.
@walsonde @stuartyeates @xahteiwi The thing that converts your bunch of files (mostly Markdown, but can be anything easier to write than HTML) to HTML using templates for styling.
@walsonde @stuartyeates @xahteiwi The generator (Pandoc and shell scripts in my case) wraps the content in the same boilerplate every time. If you want to fix every page, you make one change, rather than having to edit every page. In practice, large hand-coded sites with many authors become unmaintainable: Steve Jackson Games has a whole web magazine in that format which they no longer sell.
@walsonde @stuartyeates @xahteiwi likewise, you can build in a tagging system with no need for active scripts. Whereas a CMS asks a database "what pages have the #shoggoth tag?" every time someone visits, and generates new pages based on that query, a SSG asks that *once* when the site is built and can serve static HTML files to the next million visitors until the site owner builds it again.
@xahteiwi
Yes!
Any idea, which one can be recommended to replace Wordpress for a company website without making the people who maintain the content learn too much new stuff?
@silmaril My go-to is Pelican for general purpose and now Zensical (previously mkdocs-material) for structured documentation. But pick whatever you like as long as it understands Markdown. Markdown is the key to it all, because it is the best-balanced tradeoff between expressivity on the one hand and simplicity on the other — it beats rST, Asciidoc, and plain HTML by miles.
@silmaril @xahteiwi Drupal and WordPress have the ability to generate static sites. Keep the WP install private and use one of the many plugins to make a static site from the content.
I mention that b/c I've worked with many content/marketing/comms teams over the years and none would fare well with any of the current preferred static site generators, even ones with a half-baked GUI for editing.
@xahteiwi @petrillic you forgot Render Engine(not that many people know about it...)
Oct 21, 2026, 9:08 PM
Oct 21, 2026, 8:47 PMLoving Hakyll for a long time @xahteiwi 😀
Oct 21, 2026, 9:11 PM@xahteiwi I started building web sites in the mid-1990ies with a static site generator - it was called "emacs" ...
@xahteiwi Go back 30 years and you'll find that some of us never left 😉
@xahteiwi This is the motivation I need to migrate my site from a DB-less CMS to a SSG.
Oct 21, 2026, 9:41 PM@xahteiwi WML (website meta language) 😁
Oct 21, 2026, 9:46 PM
@xahteiwi You had that idea in the last 20 years? Static sitegen is 90's tech :-)
@helge The first SSG I consider as such was Jekyll, and that's 2008.
@xahteiwi The first one I have known is NPS and that is about 1996 or maybe 1998. Though that is not technically correct, because most sites have been statically generated by Perl or other mech before. Simply out of necessity (lack of compute power).
It was later when compute got cheaper and people started to render everything (unnecessarily) dynamically (remember Zope?)
Oct 22, 2026, 7:30 AM@helge @xahteiwi I used Website Meta Language in 1997-1999 or so for static site generation. It was an eclectic combination of Perl, M4 macros and other templating mechanisms. I even extended it with Script-Fu scripts (in Scheme!) to generate images with GIMP, replacing boring text headlines with decorative fonts. I still feel dirty for doing that.
The WML codebase still seems to be available at https://github.com/thewml/website-meta-language
Oct 22, 2026, 12:20 PM
@xahteiwi using hugo for my blog.; great tool
Try 30+ years.
@SpaceLifeForm As I've said elsewhere, I peg the advent of modern SSGs at the release of Jekyll, 2008.
My bad. I was thinking of editing HTML files with vi.
@xahteiwi Static sites really do deserve some love 🙌
@xahteiwi
I'm running my personal blog with Jekyll and I'm really satisfied with it.
@xahteiwi I thought so too. But then my hoster took my static website down yesterday, because all of the admin stuff is php...
🙈
@drayde That sucks, but part of my point is that all it takes is an rsync of your site and a DNS update, and poof you're running somewhere else.
Oct 22, 2026, 10:58 AM
Oct 23, 2026, 11:17 AM@xahteiwi I'm running my blog on Zola.
My main issue with updates isn't the engine, but actually making any time to write.
@larsmb J'accuse!
@xahteiwi what's a good one that allows easy latex use?
I use bearblog (markdown i think) but would like something more heavy weight
@adityakhanna I don't use LaTeX in any professional capacity at all, so I'm afraid I'm the wrong person to ask.