Top Open-Source Static Site Generators
I&#x27;ve tried so many static generators, but they just all fail miserably past a certain point. For a simple blog, just text, etc, they&#x27;re great. But once you get into adding images, rss, or any sort of complex layout and routing, none of them are really designed to handle that much complexity. Metalsmith came the closest because of it&#x27;s plugin system, but only because I ended up writing my own plugins and just basically writing a static generator on top of it. But it can&#x27;t do live previewing at all which is really annoying.<p>Recently I tried Nuxt because I really like Vue, but although these new types of generators are great for handling layout, and the live reloading rocks, they&#x27;re not really designed for a truly static site, the pre-rendering includes a lot of unnecessary bloat. There&#x27;s basically a copy of every post both in the html and the javascript, it&#x27;s also super hard to control it so it&#x27;s only the posts for that one page. You can remove the scripts manually but then you lose all js functionality. I gave up trying to find a sane workaround. They&#x27;re not really meant for content that&#x27;s truly static that you don&#x27;t need to update.<p>I&#x27;ve given up on this point and have just started to write my own, focusing on fast live reloading and easy config (like Vue&#x27;s cli) because that&#x27;s one of the other huge problems with all generators.