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Comment by sago | Hacker News Reader

Genuine question, not passive aggression. Why do static site generators always revolve around blogs?

Blogs are around, sure, but they're a bit old-hat now, right? There are other ways to arrange content. I've got my own single-file Python static site generator, which could handle a blog, I guess, but it would seem odd to crown that one application. Is it historical, from Jekyll? Or is blogging the overwhelming use-case for static sites?

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Gatsby author here: Blogs are basically the TODO app of the static site generator world. They're a simple well-understood pattern that let's someone easily evaluate a new framework.

While I can only speculate, I would imagine that blogs or blog-like sites are not only the majority use case for static site generators, they also make for a simple and relatable example for demonstrating the capabilities of the generator.

FYI: I've put together a showcase for static sites [1] at Planet Jekyll. If you browse the listing (a static site itself ;-) you will find project sites, online books, and much more (than just blogs). [1] http://planetjekyll.github.io/showcase

Great question, I'm not sure why media sites aren't all statically generated, would be much more economical if nothing else. Ads can still be dynamically loaded on the client, but content that never changes; why is that in a database?

When you've got multiple authors of varying technical skill, it's probably significantly easier to give them a nice web server backend to interact with than it is to try and teach them how to use the generator.

The backend is irrelevant to the interface the author uses.

But if the author needs to add content, they need to use the generator, if they're using an interface, they're no longer on a static site.

No, they're in an admin application, which has no reason to be the same "thing" as the site you're authoring.

This is what I'm talking about, people are so engrained in the way things currently work that can't see obvious things like this. It's code, you can do whatever you want.

We're working on an open-source CMS for static site generators at netlify. It's still in beta, but we just opened up the repo here:

https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms

Since netlify can already run the build of a static site whenever there's a push to git, all the CMS needs to do is manage the content in the Git repository in a user friendly way.

There's absolutely no reason non-technical users shouldn't be able to content just because the end result is not using a database...

I think making a desktop application using electron as the basis, and embedding one of the SSGs would be interesting. Are you aware of anything like that?

Closest thing I can think of is Microsoft's WebMatrix.

The interface could simply re-generate the static files on save. Movable Type works like this by default.

It probably has to do with two things: who's building it; and that blogs are both generally non-dynamic and updated frequently.

Because "river of content" is still the dominant way of consuming content on the web (Facebook, Twitter), and "blog" is the most popular shorthand for this concept for static sites.

I do find this annoying -- I use pelican but I'm trying to force it into a non-bloggy layout. You can do it, but it's always pushing a little against default behaviour.

Mind sharing the link for your static site generator?

Thanks for the interest, but it is just a kind of personal hack thing. Just feed pages through markdown and jinja templates.

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