Back in the early days of the internet websites were just a few files on a computer.

As the web became more widely used, the content became more and more ‘dynamic’. This means that two visits to the same site by two different people or at two different times would no longer return the same information.

The information returned depended on the context in which is was requested.

The static pages were replaced by scripting languages and database backends. Needless to say, this increased de complexity of building and maintaining a website. To combat this, many people started to use standard products such as Wordpress.

However as good as Wordpress (and others) might be, they do not simplify the underlying structure. They merely hide it from the site-developper. Add plugins to this, and instability of the platform becomes a real possibility. I know, I lost entire websites -more than once!- because of this.

After the initial embrace of dynamic this and dynamic that, many people started to rediscover the old way of creating websites. Static websites are -as it turns out- more than enough for many small sites or blogs! Certainly with the new wave of “comment” providers like disqus.

Creating a simple website using a comments provider is still a bit of work though.

Enter the static website generator.

Static websites generators take a lot of pain out of traditional web design. And when using a theme (like this!) this becomes even easier.

Creating content is now just a matter of writing the content in a (plain) text editor, then compiling the website and uploading it (or only the changes) to the hosting provider.

Simple, neat.

Jekyll is such a static website generator.

And Classic-Jekyll-Theme is a theme that can be used with Jekyll to create beautiful sites.

For more on Jekyll, see https://jekyllrb.com

For more on Classic, explore this website!