What's a Static Site Generator?

An SSG is a program that processes text files and outputs an HTML website

Content is usually written in Markdown
A small amount of YAML at the top of files to set variables
Layout files + a templating language

Why use an SSG?

Fast! static files get served at lightning speed
Portable a flat HTML website can be hosted anywhere, and plain text “source” files can be edited and stored easily, too
Secure no database, no code, just .html and folders

Also: Nostalgia!

Edit regular old text files, just like in the olden days! (Actually, being able to use any editor you like, and write in Markdown, is a real pleasure)

How do I get started?

GitHub Pages is the easiest way to get started
A number of SSGs support publishing directly to GitHub
Jekyll is the SSG that powers GitHub Pages

|-- _config.yml
|-- _includes
|-- _layouts
|   |-- default.html
|   `-- post.html
|-- _posts
|   |-- 2007-10-29-play-nethack.md
|   `-- 2009-04-26-barcamp-boston-4-roundup.md
|-- _site
`-- index.html

What are some other SSGs?

There are a lot of of SSGs written in every language you can think of. As an end user, you just have to be able to get your chosen tool installed. Ruby, Python, and Node.js are all easy to install and run as needed.

Gist of Ruby, Node.js, and PHP based SSGs »

My Personal Setup

I use Octopress - a framework built on top of Jekyll
Powers my blog (hosted on Heroku - simple as git push)
Powers my main site / archive (hosted on Amazon S3)
We ran Polyglot Conf directly on GitHub Pages - see github.com/PolyglotConf/polyglotconf.github.com to check out the source
Byword is my Markdown editor of choice – I keep my blog files in Dropbox so I can create & edit from anywhere
I’m experimenting with node.js and wrote a post about Node based SSGs
This presentation was done using Hekyll, a Jekyll + impress.js presentation make

Summary

Being able to easily host a handful of pages in seconds – with no long-term maintenance – is awesome
The layouts are “plain” HTML aside from a handful of simple template tags – no more learning / being restricted by CMS theme layers
Still pretty geeky, but learnable by anyone