Static Site Generation - 2025-02-27

Over the course of the decade (maybe more) that this website has been around I've gone through a few different frameworks and infrastructure for it. Although usually this would be going back-and-forth between PHP and some static site generator. For a while I've used Saait,^[1] which was perfect for my goal of simplicity, but was not at all flexible enough for what I wanted. It seems to be intended for a website that contains a single page and then a bunch of blog posts (not my setup), and so for a while I had a somewhat jury-rigged setup.

Seeing this as an issue, I decided to try my hand at writing my own static site generator. There were a few failed projects like this, but I normally ran into a few errors normally because of the language I would try to write the program in. There was a time where I would try in Rust just for the heck of it, but I would get bogged down by the compiler whining at me. Later I would try again in Bash, but that was silly because of all the limitations that Bash presents (even Saait isn't written completely in Bash). I finally started working on one in C (in a private repository at the moment), but at this point in my life I'm much too busy to actually work much on it.

Ultimately, with all this going on, I decided it was time to try out static site generation with PHP. Confused? Just run the PHP program on one of your PHP scripts. It outputs the exact same thing. All I needed to do really was to write a script that would go through all the PHP code in my website and output it as an HTML file (or XML in the case of RSS and Atom feeds). The only caveat was going to be my blog, which could get messy because of how I would need to access certain metadata about my blog posts (e.g. title or date) in order to generate both the blog page (to generate the page automatically) or the RSS and Atom feeds. This I solved by simply having files suffixed with .cfg.php which would not be processed.

All this added up to the phpsg.sh script^[2], which I had added to my repository. It's licensed under the Zlib license, if you want to use it for your own websites. Hopefully I may continue to develop my static site generator in C, but until that's done, this is a decent substitute.

Last updated: 2025-02-27