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Interesting static website generation app
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Posted by MadaboutDana
Jan 5, 2018 at 02:53 PM
I’ve just come across an app that’s really intrigued me.
Now I know it’s not strictly relevant to outlining, but we’re all wo/men of the world, and I strongly feel others will enjoy this rather lovely, simple-to-use static site generator. Not least because you could combine it with a separate search engine app (like the excellent Zoom from Wrensoft) to create a very nice knowledge base or blog.
Why not just use WordPress, you will cry? And I won’t gainsay you - it’s a great platform, I use it for all our corporate websites.
But there’s something about a simple, static website that pleases me enormously. The simplicity. The speed. The elegance. The control!
The app is Mac-only, I’m afraid, and can be bought from the Mac App Store, but a trial version is available from the developer’s website at https://spelt.io
There’s a rather nice demonstration of output in the form of the app’s documentation at https://docs.spelt.io, but the app comes with a variety of rather nice themes ranging from the ultra-minimalist to a couple of simple but elegant ones with effects. The docs contain full details of how to customise the front matter etc.
Definitely worth a look!
Cheers,
Bill
Posted by tightbeam
Jan 5, 2018 at 05:30 PM
There are quite a few of these around. For example, Hugo (unlike Spelt) supports Mac, Windows, and Linux:
Also unlike Spelt, Hugo doesn’t cost money, it’s full featured, and its developers haven’t excluded 90% of the market.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Jan 5, 2018 at 06:51 PM
True, true, but it’s not as easy to use. On the other hand, it is (much) more powerful. And that’s the thing, innit? Loads of power but not as user-friendly; amazingly user-friendly but somewhat constrained. A fairly typical trade-off.
Doesn’t mean that Spelt isn’t interesting, however. Drop-in generators aren’t easy to find (I’ve explored them exhaustively), so I’m prepared to spend a bit of cash to avoid spending a lot of time.
Although I would hasten to add that if you want to customise your Spelt templates, you will have to be prepared to invest some time.
But that’s the case for any web software, easy or not.
Posted by Skywatcher
Jan 6, 2018 at 12:57 PM
bobmclain wrote:
There are quite a few of these around. For example, Hugo (unlike Spelt)
>supports Mac, Windows, and Linux:
>
>https://gohugo.io
>
>Also unlike Spelt, Hugo doesn’t cost money, it’s full featured, and its
>developers haven’t excluded 90% of the market.
>
>
I’ve seen this argument thrown around often here in some other threads, but it’s based on a false premise. Developers develop for where the USERS are, not just based on abstract market share. The fact that Windows has overall 85% of market share doesn’t mean users in a particular field all spread out evenly across that distribution ( and of that 85%, how much are « passive » machines ? Servers, etc.. ) .
For example ( and I know this first hand since I’m that field), audio and music professionals are 80% Mac users. Pretty much all professional music studios are based around Macs, as well as a majority of both amateur and pro musicians. Same thing with graphic designers , the overwhelming majority are Mac users.
. And there are historic reasons for that : in the 90’s , it wasn’t as easy as today to make the computer talk to external devices ( mainly audio interfaces, and the MIDI protocol that makes the software communicate with synthesizers, drum machines, mixing consoles, all sort of devices used by musicians and audio engineers ), and the Mac had a huge edge in ease of use compared to PCs in reliability and ease of installation of drivers.
Same thing with graphics and video ( Apple’s emphasis on graphics meant that fonts were handled better on Macs, and Quicktime made it the de-facto platform for video editing.) . Apple also marketed itself very heavily to those users, touting its superiority ( at that time ) in those field.
Therefore if you’re an audio or graphic software developper, it would have been crazy not to develop your software for Mac, since that’s where 80% of your potential buyers reside, and even today, there’s still a lot of audio and graphic software that is Mac only.
This has changed now, and Macs and PCs are pretty much equal , but partly for these historical reasons, the market share in those fields remains the same.
The same way that corporations overwhelmingly use Windows, even though Macs are perfectly able to run business software, has also to do with a deep penetration of the business and corporation market by IBM and Microsoft that happened very early on, and a very solid support by Microsoft towards corporations in a way that was far superior to the way Apple handled that market ( and even today, still doesn’t handle it as efficiently as Microsoft) Therefore , if you’re a business software developper, it would be crazy not to develop for PC’s, because that where 80% of your potential buyers are. Same if you’re in the server software market ( that’s probably 99,9999 % Windows and Linux based ), it’s safe to just entirely ignore the Mac platform.
It’s probably the same with writing and outlining software. Developers are not idiots, they’re aware of the fact that Windows is 85% of the market, but it seems that the majority of users of this type of applications are Mac users ( I honestly don’t know why ), and so they develop for where the USERS are.
Posted by Paul Korm
Jan 6, 2018 at 01:26 PM
@Skywatcher makes good points. I would also wonder if developers of the kind of software discussed here have much opportunity to penetrate tightly controlled Windows desktop environments in government or industry. I’ve done work for a large U.S. federal agency, using their Windows equipment (laptop), and there isn’t even a snowball’s chance in hell that any client software discussed on this forum could make it onto that machine, and use of the websites discussed here (e.g., Workflowy) is absolutely banned. That agency might be more strict than some, but probably not by much.