# Static site generators (SSG)

```{note}
This page is draft.

It is a follow-up to <https://twitter.com/PogrebnyakE/status/1267016141848883202>
```



Lessons learned:

- blogging, landings and documentation are separate domains for static site generators(SSG)
- maintaining visually attractive themes is hard, it is a lot of work
- themes not easily portable between 
- some good themes/SSG may fall out scope for subjective reasons, can work well for other users
- many cool themes historically developed for Jekyll and still Wordpress
- Github Pages supports some blogging and not docs themes, need install Ruby otherwise
- port of mkdocs-material to Hugo is 2017, and Hugo versions are way ahead
- JS-based (React/Vue) generators are a world of its own to be discovered
- top SSG amount 40k stars on Github (Next, Gatsby, Hugo, Jekyll) and next round of contenders around 10k (python-based), see https://www.staticgen.com/

Student project idea:

- sort Hugo themes by popularity (stars) vs activity (last commit date or commits last 3 months) 
- Academic can easily get into top ranks in both, also has great language support
- can help distinguish stable, emerging and forgotten themes (theme catalogs ususlly list them)
- from a user story perspective - one may choose the theme first, SSG second

Some 2020 reality:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">1. Make a blog using Jekyll on GitHub pages <br>2. Rewrite it w/ Hugo<br>3. Rewrite it w/ custom static site generator <br>4. Rewrite it w/ Gatsby <br>5. Move hosting to S3<br>6. Remove Google analytics <br>7. Write your own analytics<br>7. Move hosting to raspberry pi <br>8. Only have 3 posts written</p>&mdash; Alex Garcia (@agarcia_me) <a href="https://twitter.com/agarcia_me/status/1265355017768198144?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 26, 2020</a></blockquote>