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‘Web Development Reading List #120: Safari 9.1, Chakra Core Open Sourced, ES6 Object Shorthand Syntax’

‘Web Development Reading List #119: Bulletproof Third-Party Content and Progressive Applications’

Revisiting Firefox’s DevTools

Web Development Reading List #117: Storytelling, Security in Devtools and 350ms Tap Delay

Website Layout Tools Compared: Flexbox Vs. Susy

Web Development Reading List #116

Static Site Generators Reviewed: Jekyll, Middleman, Roots, Hugo

Web Development Reading List #112: Edge Update and Performance Monitoring

Web Development Reading List #111: Preconnect, Dynamic Responsive Images, DOM Event Listeners

Why Static Site Generators Are The Next Big Thing

At StaticGen, our open-source directory of static website generators, we’ve kept track of more than a hundred generators for more than a year now, and we’ve seen both the volume and popularity of these projects take off incredibly on GitHub during that time, going from just 50 to more than 100 generators and a total of more than 100,000 stars for static website generator repositories. Influential design-focused companies such as Nest and MailChimp now use static website generators for their primary websites. Vox Media has built a whole publishing system around Middleman. Carrot, a large New York agency and part of the Vice empire, builds websites for some of the world’s largest brands with its own open-source generator, Roots. And several of Google’s properties, such as “A Year In Search” and Web Fundamentals, are static.

Static websites are hardly new, going all the way back to the beginning of the web. So, why the sudden explosion in interest? What’s up? Why now?

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