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Grav did the trick for me when I faced a customer who didn't like ghost as it's supposedly too complicated
Okay, serious question, I'd appreciate the help;
What is the reason for a "static site generator" to exist? For the life of me I can't understand this. Ever since I was a kid I was making (albeit low quality) static websites first in Frontpage and then in Dreamweaver, and since it's a static website, all you do is upload to ANY web server and the site just worked.
If I wanted a more fancy GUI, I'd use a template or make a website in Photoshop and just export the layers for web publishing.
So what kind of role does this generator fill? Even if it's a blog, judging from all the complications of running a generator, it's just as easy to have a .html site made in Dreamweaver for you blog, and just manually edit the file and upload it via FTP.
I just can't understand the need?
You write in plain text. You don't need to write HTML. Most of the people using SSGs do not ever use Dreameweaver, but prefer to work in console or otherwise.
It auto-generates dates, tags, categories for you.
If you are a dreamweaver user, you will just end up using wordpress.
Not the target market.
Performance, all static files.
No security issues.
Simplicity, once you understand it.
You need to appreciate it's limitations though, no dynamic content although some are trying to implement it which I think defeats the purpose.
Quite a few bloggers are heading to or have arrived at Static Site Generators. for the above reasons. For blogs it's all about the content not the pretty colours and Jekyll, Hugo and others are attractive for that purpose. More of course, just a quick view.
People run blogs with commenting and discussion via SSGs...they use Disqus or a similar Javascript plugin. It's actually very common in what I've seen.
Or Markdown.
OK, you're a smart guy, so I'll ask you. What is the purpose of Markdown? I find it difficult to understand why it would be better than HTML for any equivalent function. Most web people already know basic HTML, so why another language?
It's simpler to write, simpler to read, and is still fully readable when displayed as plain text.
That doesn't feel like an answer to me. OK, I respect that you feel that way, but since I don't, it would be nice to find something a little more definitive.
Personally, I find it harder to read because I don't know what all the elements do and so find it hard to visualize. I suppose if I was to spend the time learning the language, I'd feel differently. It seems to me that browsers actually end up converting it to HTML anyway.
Maybe try http://dillinger.io/ :-)
I like Markdown because it keeps things readable. Even in plain text it doesn't matter if you don't know what **this part** means, because in plain text it looks like one is trying to emphasize the word. In HTML it gets rendered as strong.
The advantage of Markdown is I can save documents in plain text on my computer (saving space and somewhat ensuring future ability to read said document), but still have the option later of rendering the text as rich text or HTML.
These are the stated design goals of Markdown, I'm just describing them to you. Whether you (or I) feel it does those things well, is a different discussion
So on a scale between plain text and HTML, Markdown is a whole lot closer to plain text than to HTML.
Here's a real-world: guy wants to sit down and write a blog post. Composing the page via HTML is a lot of tags, visually hard to read, and comparatively error-prone to write by hand. With Markdown, you can write that and get a rough idea visually of the major text-oriented layouts (I mean, you're not going to do complex layouts but as far basic text formatting you're covered). It'll be faster to write also because you don't have to do all those tags.
I'm not the apostle of Markdown or anything...just saying that's where it comes from.
Another way of looking at Markdown is that it's a way to do rich text markup in pure text, using simple formatting tags that are widely understood/supported...from that you can take it to HTML and I believe there are converters to RTF, ps, etc.
wrt general population -
People already know how to use Markdown from reddit, discord, etc.
People can't wrap their heads around HTML for whatever reason.
Talking about my cohort, not you older bunch that grew up with irc and bbcode and whatnot
It was specifically because I figured you weren't "the apostle of Markdown" that I thought your opinion would be of use to me.
OK, I'm getting it now. Especially after studying that dillinger.io link. I didn't realize it did quite that much. I've had a very poor introduction to Markdown as it tends to show up on tech forums like this where everybody already knows html. I personally often write very simple html that is quite readable - hell, I even use /pre extensively. In any case, I still don't really like markup, but at least now I can see the point and will have a slightly better opinion of it going forward.
A Static site's content will outlive the content-integrity of your typical wordpress Blog.
Here's a nice one by the Flask author : https://www.getlektor.com/
Somewhat more feature-ful than the typical SSG
So, which cms did we pick?
Just an FYI - If you want to try Ghost blog, check out my auto setup scripts on GitHub. They now support Ubuntu, Debian and CentOS. The install process is fully automated and supports up to 10 blogs on one server. See:
https://github.com/hwdsl2/setup-ghost-blog
Earlier discussion:
https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/81938/script-install-up-to-10-ghost-blogs-on-ubuntu-or-debian