Why Static Site Generators are Awesome

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New show on Syntax podcast by Wes Bos and Scott Tolinski about Why Static Site Generators are Awesome. Haven’t listened to it yet but sure there’ll be some Hugo goodness in there :slightly_smiling_face:

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I have just discovered the joy of static site generation with Hugo. There is definitely something comforting about knowing there is no dynamic content generation happening; there is less that can go wrong and it takes away that processing overhead.

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Not really, unfortunately.

One of the speakers works on Gatsby tutorials and videos (which probably explains the angle of the podcast).

“Working in Gatsby is awesome”. (Around 11:30).

“I never used Hugo.” (around 11:40).

“Wow, Gatsby is great for a lot of reasons.” (around 11:55).

“When you load a site in gatsby it loads in hundred milliseconds. wow.” (paraphrasing here, around 14:30).

This is a bit misleading, because they talk about page load time here, not page render time. A WordPress site’s page load can also be a few hundred milliseconds. And a static website can easily load in a couple of seconds if you use a lot of external resources like jQuery and other client-side code.

Their general point that static websites are quicker is true of course. But that doesn’t mean that if you have a static website, it will load in hundred milliseconds.

“Hugo is based on the Go language. I’ve been toying a bit around with the Go language.” (starting around 19:05.) :roll_eyes:

What they say is irrelevant because as a Hugo user you don’t write Go. Also a bit misinformation I think. People don’t need to learn Go to understand or work with Hugo. You can do everything you want in Hugo without learning Go. :slight_smile:

“I have not used Hugo at all. Do you have experience with Hugo?” “Not at all. But my parent’s dog is name Hugo.” (around 19:20) :pensive:

Although they do mention that Hugo looks capable and has hundreds of themes. So that’s a nice mention of Hugo benefits. :slight_smile:

And the discussion of the benefits of static website generators that starts at 12:00 of course also applies to Hugo. But it’s more a Gatsby podcast with a mere mention of Hugo. The speakers neither used Jekyll and Hexo.

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Thanks for the transcript @Jura :+1:

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Thanks @Jura, sorry about the lack of Hugo :disappointed: Gatsby’s nice but doesn’t generate static HTML & CSS (ie depends upon React), which is a bit of a deal breaker. I’ll do some tweeting at Syntax!