A simple approach to static site generation

This blog is over 7 years old now, and I'm still writing on it! Not bad! It has always been a statically generated site, backed by my own static generator. In fact, the name "stitcher" comes from that generator. It's called that way because it "stitches" content together. My goal was to make a super fast website, and I think I succeeded in doing so: it has a score of 100 on lighthouse, both mobile and web, so yeah. I did something right.

Now, my static generator has gone through three complete rewrites over the years. When I started out I dreamt of open sourcing it and it becoming something "big", but now I hope no one will ever use it! Over the years I've come to realise I made a lot of things very complicated for no real reason. For example: I wanted to manage everything with YAML — big mistake. You can take a look at it yourself, this is part of my site's configuration:

There's so much overhead converting YAML config into something that generates a website, and it's really not worth it. Especially when you realise I need a non-static version for local development. So I actually parse this YAML into a routable application as well 🤢.

Leave a Comment