Static Site Generators (SSGs) provide a content generation environment incorporating templates–that can be customized to give your website a uniform look (with sidebars, added search bar, menus, etc)–along with a program that takes content files that you create by writing text files using a markup language, that, with a push of a button, generates an updated website and pushes the updates to your web folder for you. They are called “static” because the content is created at push time, in contrast to content management systems that use a database or files along with code to generate each page on the fly as a browser requests it. Consequently, websites generated via SSGs tend to be very quick and responsive in comparison. The trade-off is that changes require a regeneration and push of the new site, however the SSG should make this process quick and rather painless.
There are a few static site generator packages installed at SDF. Their templating systems are rather robust:
You can also install these simple site generator progams in your user space to use:
There are also all kinds of alternative tools people are making all the time, that can give you a simplified SSG-like functionality, but much simpler, and can be run with just USER membership. For example: