Generate resource-friendly static websites
Thanks to Rust, three new generators create static websites from Markdown very efficiently.
There are a number of legacy website generators written in Rust:
If you want to learn how to write a simple generator in Rust, you will find an interesting blog post here.
A challenge for HTML generators written in Rust is that they need a template engine that translates content with layouts into HTML pages at runtime.
The off spring🔗🔗
The current generation of website generators implemented in Rust has learned from the ergonomics and simplicity of Nextjs, Eleventy und Gatsby - all written in Javascript - it seems.
Pylon🔗
Pylon is a static website generator that can be easily integrated into existing shell scripts. The following special features are implemented:
- Link Checker
- Copy data directories into the website structure
- Global metadata can be made accessible to all pages
- Asset are located in the same directory as the content
- Freely definable shortcodes for use in markdown
Like Zola, Pylon uses Jinja templates implemented with Tera.
Oinky🔗
Oinky uses Handlebars as a template language to translate markdown files into a static HTML website.
The special feature of Oinky is the DSL, which allows the creation of data structures that can then be processed with handlebars.
Blades, 2020🔗
[Blades][13]is fast and reduced to the essential features. With [Ramhorns][14], Blades uses a fast, [Mustache][15] - based template engine with no if, else expressions or loops.
Blades claims to be 10x faster than the speedy [Hugo][16], but doesn't provide any benchmarks to prove it.
As with Zola, themes are also supported, but the amount of style templates is limited compared to Hugo.
Conclusion🔗
If you want to process tens to hundreds of thousands of Markdown files, you can use the generators presented here to save a lot of time and maybe even money when updating static websites at high frequency.