(see http://staticsitegenerators.net/)

Why do we need another one?

Also, everyone has slightly different requirements, so everyone likes to build their own.

I will most likely soon build my own static site generator, because none of the ones out there do exactly what I want. I will most likely borrow from at least a few of the examples out there and then post it on my github so there is yet another one.

I think we're seeing a proliferation simply because it is so easy to share code these days. Imagine how many Fibonacci generators would have been out there if it were as easy to share code when those were popular (I want to say 10 years ago but maybe it was longer).

[0]: http://www.metalsmith.io/

Why bother with the templating? Use Jinja2?

    def fib(n):
        x  = ((1 + sqrt(5)) / 2) ** n
        x -= ((1 - sqrt(5)) / 2) ** n
        return x / sqrt(5)

    from math import sqrt
    from decimal import Decimal

    def fib(n):
        x  = Decimal((1 + sqrt(5)) / 2) ** n
        x -= Decimal((1 - sqrt(5)) / 2) ** n
        return x / Decimal(sqrt(5))

    print fib(1000)
    print fib(10000)
    print fib(1290309123)


  $ time python ~/fib.py
  4.346655768693891359691727380E+208
  3.364476487644307695949089018E+2089
  2.879417086171668653426018537E+269658658

  real	0m0.138s
  user	0m0.086s
  sys	0m0.026s

Because this one is much simpler to use than Jekyll and doesn't require you to install Ruby.

Did we need a new one to do this? Absolutely none of the hundreds of existing languages could have possibly worked, so let's reinvent SSI with different syntax?

Or someone should write an SSI static site generator.

Edit: Although what would be really nice would be the same kind of pre-processor that works with apache ssi directives

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_disk_cache.html

re:edit hxincl uses a similar style as ssi but with a couple of enhancements:

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/en/man1/hxincl.1....

if you want exactly SSI syntax, ain't nuthin' stopping you from pointing curl at localhost.

I'm sorry, but this project feels more like "art" than a practical tool.

Plus, with a few basic lines of PHP (available on every shared host) you can pre-generate your site statically as well (and on the server, to save you the re-uploading).

Or you could just, y'know, run the static site generator on the server. What Linux doesn't have Python installed?

You should automate that with Grunt or Gulp. Static .html pages is best practise these days instead of dynamic templating.

Case in point, are you planning to support this 'dead simple' template language for users of your hosting site? If so, what happens if I try to include something outside the site root, in a Dropbox area which I control? https://github.com/braceio/tags/blob/master/tags/tags.py#L13

As for that case, it won't work and we'll try to help you reorganize your content so it does. :)

http://stackoverflow.com/a/3220572/2363

However we chose python, and easy_install because it's pre-installed all macbooks going back to snow leopard. (specifically python 2.6.1 which comes with distutils needed for our setup.py file) This means for many web designers, brace-tags doesn't require that you update your python install, or really know python at all. It's the simplest command line install experience we could come up with.

Make my point clear: think about sudo pip install X vs advocating everyone to use virtualenv. The cost of cleaning up any mess from sudo outweigh the cost of getting pip and virtualenv.

Look. I agree that getting new package install is painful. Even on Linux, I often have to add PPA to get the latest version.

The "include" file is just a js file that document.writes your html, so its not easy to make edits because you would need to do it in a big stream of escaped code.

They won't work if user has js turned off.

They are awful for seo because the includes will not be there when the page is crawled

They are not semantic for writing things like <html><head> and will throw your browser into quirks mode because your page would effectively start with a script tag.

But I used the hell out of them back when dynamic hosting was hard to come by (geocities, tripod etc)

I'm in the fun position of essentially being a graphic designer made to be a web designer in a stingy startup environment where they don't want to pay someone to actually code things. Another designer and I put together a very sad website, and I wouldn't mind having a system for having includes for my header and footer, but even simple concepts like preprocessing scare me off. Heck, I run scared at the mention of the command line. I guess the only real answer is to bite the bullet and learn this stuff (I do frequent HN after all, you'd think I'd be more comfortable with some of these concepts).

I know enough git to be able to manage the basics (pulling and pushing) and a bit of command line stuff. If you ever get into working with web frameworks in just about any language, I think those are going to be kind of essential. It's probably not going to be as scary as you think though.

However, everything else is so complicated if all you want is simple file inclusion.

You'd still need PHP installed on your home machine, but then again, it's not like you don't have to install some pre-processor anyway.

or just use php file.php > file.html

try to have 1 header in like 10 pages. That is a lot of copy pasting :-)