Coming back from holidays, I fired my RSS reader and, among many interesting posts, I found this one from Smashing Magazine about static website generators being the Next Big Thing on the web (and a follow-up deep-diving into four of them).
The first paper describes how the web started as something static, became all dynamic and is progressively coming back to something more static, at least for some specific tasks. The interesting thing is that the author also describes pros and cons of each stage and why the web jumped to the next level.
While reading this, I couldn’t help thinking of Jadoo, a pet project I started in 2007. Its goal was to get rid of the complexity and number of resources required to run a dynamic blog system. Following some notes from Alexandre Dulaunoy, it was written in Python and already used concepts now hidden under buzzwords 😉 like templating and a rudimentary meta-data organization. At that time, there was nothing like Markdown, assets management, caching, Github, … (not as widespread as today at least). There is an initial post and an update – then I gave up (reasons inside). Note drawbacks I wrote at that time are still drawbacks of current static website generators (manual update and local edition only). All these ideas in 2007, one year before Jekyll … 😉
P.S. The irony is that posts about Jadoo were later transferred to WordPress – and this blog is also npw currently hosted on WordPress!
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