Static Websites &
Static Site Generators

Immense promise

Static websites and the tools that build them - static site generators, or SSGs in short - are a curiously underrepresented technology that could be saving our society millions of work hours, dollars, carbon emissions and unnecessary stress. Although not every website can be made static (as will be explained below), there are huge incentives for us to make use of static websites as much as we can. So how does it work?

Faircamp (to use it as example) is a static site generator. It is an application that takes your audio files (and optionally also image and text files), and from them, automatically, builds a complete, static website. On a technical level, a static website is just a folder on your disk. If you make a backup copy of it, no one can ever take that away from you! You can open your static site directly from your disk (by opening the file index.html in your browser), as you don't even need a server to look at it. If you want to publish a static website to the world, all you need to do is upload it to a webhost - any webhost - it will work with virtually every one of them!

Now you might be wondering: If they're so cool, why doesn't everybody on this planet use static websites?

A single catch

The only prohibitive reason for not using a static website is when you need dynamic functionality, such as allowing someone to log in, or allowing someone to make edits to the content. A static website is read-only, and therefore it can not provide such functionality, at least not on its own. Think of a static website like a book whose pages you can browse and read, but whose pages cannot be written on. Or think of it like a room full of paintings, where you can move around and look at images, but you can not change anything. Or - in the case of faircamp - think of it like a record player, allowing you to put on and listen to different records, but everybody gets their own record player and nobody can ever see what others listened to, or how often, etc. In any case, with a static website, visitors never get to write to the page, because with a static website, only you as the author of the page get to make and publish changes. That is of course a limitation, but it is exactly through this that the really good things come by: No maintenance, no security issues, no crashes, no spam, ...

An opportunity

The examples and feature overview on the homepage should give you you a taste of Faircamp's possibilities. Artistry means making the most of one's tools, and just like a pencil can be enough for an artist to enchant their audience, a static website can perfectly do the same for yours. In familiarizing yourself with static websites and static site generators you have much to gain too: Websites that work forever, fast and trouble-free, and cheap too, because hosting is so simple.

Lastly, remember that a faircamp site does not have to live in isolation - you can make it your audio showcase, but still offer your audience many other ways to connect through other services and pages that you link to.