Recently I’ve had to spin up a number of blogs and simple sites for friends and customers. The process of doing basic web development has changed so much over the past 15 years! Fifteen years back I might have created a website in pure html and css, perhaps some javascript thrown in if they wanted a sparkling mouse cursor, or some background music (so kitsch!). If you went back perhaps 10 years ago, I might have spun up a website using ASP.NET Web Forms. If you asked me to building a website 7 years ago I would have created a HTML5/CSS3/Angular website.

What about today? Today I build simple websites using static site generators. In fact this site itself was written using Hugo, a super fast and robust static site generator written in GoLang. A static site generator is a tool that takes a folder of static content, blog articles written in markdown, images, Sass files, etc and converts them into flat HTML content. They can even do things like automagically crop, resize and thumbnail your photos for different display sizes.

Even better, store your site in a GitHub repo and use a service like Render to host your site, from a CDN for fast loading, for FREE.

The world of programming has truly come a long way! And boy has it gotten good!