Moved to static website
February 20, 2016
Today I moved www.wllnr.nl from Wordpress to a static website hosted on google cloud storage.
Wordpress required me to run a web server with PHP and a database. While I always liked to run my own servers, it was always a lot of work when you need to update, migrate every other year and a half.
After trying a few static site generators I decided to go for Metalsmith. I liked the simple and pluggable nature. Metalsmith works nicely with Gulp using gulpsmith.
Gulp build
The build system builds .html pages from a content directory with .md (markdown) files. The content directory has a pages and posts folder. The .md files have metadata (title, date, layout) in them in YAML format.
Metadata example for this page:
---
title: Moved to static website
slug: moved to static website
date: 2016-02-20
layout: post.swig
---The pages are build to static .html files with the pattern :slug. The blog files are build to static .html files with the pattern blog/:date/:slug.
I will go more in detail in a next blog post: