I've decided to Switch this site to another static site generator: Wintermith. I won't go over the reasons why static site generators are awesome (or harmful) for simple websites and blogs. This site used to be powered by Hyde, an SSG written in python. This post will describe the reasons why I decided to drop Hyde in favour of Wintersmith.

Introduction

Static site generators have become quite popular recently. While there aren't any official figures to my knowledge, I believe Jekyll is the most popular static site generator (SSG) and powers Github pages.

Despite this, I chose Jekyll's evil twin Hyde which looked like an elegant and cool alternative. At first Hyde was quite easy to use and play around with for a newcomer like myself. However, one of Hyde's biggest drawback was (and still is) its documentation. As a result finding information was quite hard, and I mainly built the first version of this site by looking at other Hyde powered sites, namely http://michealgrosner.com and https://vincent.bernat.im.

I also experienced weird behaviours, quirks & bugs between versions, and Hyde seemed overly complicated to me.

Wintersmith

I started looking for simpler alternatives and was pleasantly surprised to find out that there were several node.js based SSGs. I decided to try Wintersmith. Here are my favorite Wintersmith features:

• Small and simple code base.
• Jade templates
• Nice plugin system (I use the stylus plugin)
• Underscore.js which is great when working with templates.

As a Web developer and JavaScript being my primary programming language, I really liked Wintersmith's bundled features, and was able to effortlessly port my Hyde-based site to Wintersmith.

Wintersmith is very easy to install:

$ npm install wintersmith -g

To create a new site:

$ wintersmith new <path>

this will create the basic structure for your site:

• a contents folder: this folder contains all of your assets (images, css and js files) and your content written in markdown or json files.
• a templates folder: this folder contains all of your templates used to render your content.
• a config.json file: this file is your main config file, where you put any global options, here is mine:

{
   "locals": {
        "mode": "prod",
        "url": "https://www.alexnormand.com",
        "name": "Alex Normand",
        "owner": "Alex Normand",
        "description": "Alex Normand",
        "index_articles": 3,
        "menu" : [
             {
               "name": "Home",
               "description": "Home Page",
               "url": "/"
              },
              {
               "name": "Github",
               "description": "My Gihub profile",
               "url": "https://github.com/alexnormand"
              },
              {
               "name": "Blog",
               "description": "Blog",
               "url": "/blog"
              },
              {
               "name": "About",
               "description": "About ",
               "url": "/about"
              }
        ]
     },
     "plugins": [
         "wintersmith-stylus/"
     ]
}

And finally when you're done editing your templates and customizing your site:

$ wintersmith build

this will generate a static version of your site in a build folder ready to be uploaded to any web server.

Wintermsith is a promising project and is being actively developed by Johan Nordberg. It is a flexible, fast and easy to use static site generator and I highly recommend it.

At the time of writing, I haven't come across any other website powered by Wintersmith, so feel free to fork this site on Github.