Static Sites Rock!

The static in today’s static websites is not really all that static. In general, it simply means is that the site doesn’t have tightly bound backend components. The site lives almost entirely in a browser and doesn’t need to call home to render pages or provide data.

For many sites, this is all that’s needed. These new static sites don’t consist of, say, JSP pages that need to be rendered on the server or that connect to databases to pull information.

Instead, they’re generated once, at deploy time and are served to the browser as HTML, JavaScript and CSS from then on. They use browser-side magic to make the static site very dynamic and engaging.

There are many benefits to using pre-generated static sites.

They’re scalable; in that without a ‘backend’ you don’t need to worry about handling massive amounts of traffic. They’re secure; because without a backend, there’s nothing really to hack. Without a ‘live’ backend component, there’s also nothing to patch, so no worries about 0-day hackage.

This is not to say that pre-generated static sites can completely replace WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc. But they should have a place in any modern application developers tool belt.

My favorite generator is currently Jekyll (https://jekyllrb.com/). We use Jekyll to host sites directly out of an S3 bucket. No servers, no patching, just files that get opened in your browser.

Github pages (https://pages.github.com/) also provides a Jekyll compatible way to create pretty sites (https://electric-it.github.io/minimart) without needing to wrestle with Drupal.

Static site generators aren’t new, but they’re still very cool and relevant:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/11/modern-static-website-generators-next-big-thing/