6 Static Blog Generators That Aren't Jekyll

Originally published at: http://www.sitepoint.com/6-static-blog-generators-arent-jekyll/

In a previous article, I compared WordPress, the world’s most popular blogging platform, with Jekyll, a less-conventional approach to blogging whereby you create all of your content inside local text files before running a command to generate a purely static version of your blog. Jekyll has a range of benefits:

  1. You have far more control over every aspect of your blog.
  2. Since there’s no database involved, the performance is unbeatable.
  3. Many find blogging from their desktop to be more intuitive.

But while Jekyll is by far the most popular static blog generator, and it’s the one I recommend for first-timers, there are many to choose from.

Let’s talk about some of the most interesting alternatives.

1. Middleman

middleman

Jekyll has become increasingly flexible with each release but, at its core, it encourages bloggers to follow a precise set of conventions. This is a big part of its user friendliness but some might find it limiting.

If, after playing around with Jekyll, you find yourself wishing that it had feature X or Y, check out Middleman. It’s built upon the same language — Ruby — but, right out of the box, it’s far more flexible.

Here are a few reasons to love Middleman:

  1. While there’s a “Blog” module, you’re not confined to sticking with the basic structure of a blog. You can build much more complex websites.
  2. There are plenty of great plugins available, like sitemap generation, image optimization, local gzipping, and all sorts of deployment solutions.
  3. An incredible amount of functionality and flexibility can be found within the main configuration file.

But since Middleman can do a lot more, it’s also trickier to get a handle on, compared to Jekyll. It’s not overtly difficult, but you will have to spare a little extra time and attention to manipulating it to your will.

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I’ve actually started using Pelican for a few of my blogs and I must say, I love it over WordPress. There are a couple of things I want to build into it, but so far it has served me very well.

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What about Bolt.cm ?

I am running it on a few sites. And i think it’s awesome. Focus on content and forget about the rest.

It works splendid and you don’t need that, ruby, gem scr*p :wink:

Just drag the files to a server, login and done.

  • no db. no gems. etc

Except Bolt doesn’t seem to be a static site generator. It seems every request will hit the database where your content is stored… (unless I missed something on their website).

Maybe you need to do a bit more research, Octopress is based on and uses Jekyll for generation, it is simply a framework built on top of Jekyll. You should also have a look at sculpin.io which is built in PHP. I use it for my personal site and found it much easier to work with compared to Octopress.

This was pointed out in the article. :smile:

That’s included in the comprehensive list of other options provided at the end of the article.

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What about assemble.io + www.ghost.org? A very important one that should be in the list. Either way thanks for the article! Github for OS Ghost Blogging platform: https://github.com/tryghost/Ghost

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