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Comment by paulddraper | Hacker News Reader

Aw...this makes me so sad.

I need to fix my brain. Every time I see "static sites", I think "oh great, no dynamic server or client code, just static HTML/CSS for fast loading".

If I'm going to have to undergo a "compile step" for my website, it's going to do something worthwhile, darn it.

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I keep waiting for someone to write a program that consumes as input Markdown text and emits as output a pure HTML/CSS site literally like this http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ except with the text from the Markdown file instead of swear words. Maybe it could even accept several Markdown files and make them into blog posts or something.

If nobody else does I guess eventually I'll get fed up and build it myself :\

Instead of HTML/CSS why not parse markdown to a something even more direct like terminal output. My biddle application does this. Try it out let me know what you thing. Here are some commands to get started:

  git clone git@github.com:prettydiff/biddle.git
  cd biddle
  node biddle    (parses the readme.md file to the terminal)

  node biddle get http://example.com/document.md
  node biddle markdown downloads/document.md

  node biddle markdown downloads/document.md 60 (word wrap at 60 character width)

Link to biddle!

https://github.com/prettydiff/biddle

I've used Pandoc.

You can generate a HTML fragment, or an HTML file, or HTML with table of contents, CSS, and footer, etc. http://pandoc.org/demos.html

It has some pretty heavy dependencies, but so far I haven't found anything better for generating a true static site from Markdown. I probably haven't looked hard enough either.

+1 for Pandoc

I use it a lot, I've collected of quite large collection of long form articles/"opinion pieces"/etc from websites and used pandoc to translate them into epub. (after manually pruning some html)

The only thing more fragile and hard to setup than a static site generator is probably pandoc. All of these are terrible Yak Shaving opportunities. Yet, I still do it.

The Pandoc site appears to provide binary downloads for the major platforms. Myself, I just always do `apt install pandoc`.

Pandoc is written in Haskell, but when built it's just a regular binary.

Plenty of static site generators, as they're called, exist to do this. Good jumping-off points would be investigating Jekyll (written in Ruby) and Hugo (written in Golang).

https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll

https://github.com/spf13/hugo

Yup but they're bloated.

I agree. In Hugo's case there wasn't even a way to generate a completely static website for the longest time (i.e. not a blog or anything like that) and I'm not even sure they've fixed it yet.

Org-mode can do everything you're describing.

Pandoc does this. However I've found that you really quickly run into limits. I prefer a slightly-more-elaborate-but-still-no-database solution like Kirby. Throw it onto any budget web hoster with php enabled and you get easy Markdown-based content management, but still separation of content and templates, plugins for a contact form or picture gallery etc.

If you don't want anything complicated you could actually use Pandoc to generate the HTML for you. Then you could either insert the resulting HTML into a layout template yourself or have Pandoc do it (by creating a template for Pandoc).

EDIT: Oops, Pandoc was already mentioned. I should have refreshed the site.

I found something exactly like it: https://github.com/alexanderteinum/simple-website/

Example: https://alexanderteinum.github.io/

Lately I was searching for static site generator that would require no configuration. It is written in single file of straightforward go. It gives you just two sections: posts and pages.

This is pretty much what I have in mind. Awesome :)

Here you go. I use this to create my personal website. https://github.com/dirkk0/microCMS

I totally agree. Make it worth the extra layers of junk.

There is server side templating and asynchronously loaded js. Just because it loads quickly and efficiently and without massive js bloat does not mean it isn't useful or dynamic

Set of Markdown files -> set of HTML files just seems so obvious of an approach, I don't see the advantage of anything else.

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