Folks Making Their Own Website Builders
Hacking HTML Behind The Scenes
Saw a post go by of another person making their own static site generator1. Figured I'd start making a collection of folks who make their own website builders.
Start Your Engines
- Declan Chidlow - who runs vale.rocks off of Adduce.
- Ed Davies kicked into the self-made site engine in 2011 with their Blog Software.
- The Hundredrabbits Wiki which is run off their custom C code.
- Jeremy Keith - mentioned in a Blog Question Challenge that adactio.com is run off a "hand-cobbled mix of PHP and MySQL".
- Jezra.net coming in hot with this one starting in 2016.
- kiki from Tomodashi Industrial. Available from free as shareware. You can also get it as a purchase. I had to make a quick rulling in my head on if that was cool or now. Verdict, obviously: I'll allow it. It's still a site generator someone made for their site. They just happen to offer the option of buying it too.
- madness has been archived, but it still counts. From algernon ludd who also did one in GNU make!?!? (He decided that was a little more than the world was ready for so didn't release that one).
- McChessers has one. The source is here.
- Molly White built a static timeline generator and annotate. I think I saw mention of something else. I'm guessing either those or another home grown creation is used for mollywhite.net and/or the other sites Molly runs.
- Novak the historical generator from goofpunk.
- panblog a bash and pandoc-based static site generator with a demo site here.
- Paul Anthony Webb - webb.page which is one of the most interesting designs I've seen in recent memory.
- Remy Sharp open-sources all the content as well as the blog software for their site.
- Oddμ which can run as a server as well as a static site generator. From Alex Schroeder.
- Phraxos from caffeine is straight up HTML. "No Markdown, no JavaScript, no BS". Respect.
- Tapestry brought to you by Mx Autumn. It uses Plates which is new to me. Looks like a solid templating system.
More To Follow
I know I've seen others. The idea of making this list hadn't occurred yet. I'll be keeping a closer eye out now.
If you know of any, shoot me a note on Mastodon or Bluesky
This is the original Mastodon post post if you want to add something there.
-a
Endnotes
Surprising no one, I'm not the first one to have done a list like this. See also: The text and the code go hand in hand from The Transjovian Council
Some of these push beyond personal. They've been made ready for other folks to use as well. Those still count as far as I'm concerned.
There is, of course, Hugo, Jekyll, Zola, and a slew of others. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out those started as personal projects.
Footnotes
A Static Site Generator is an app that makes websites.