Static Site Generators Lightning Talk at HTML5 Vancouver Meetup

I gave a quick 10 minute lightning talk at the HTML5 Vancouver Meetup group about static site generators (SSGs).

I ended up putting the presentation together using Hekyll, which is, itself, an SSG for making presentations using impress.js. impress.js is an HTML5-based clone of Prezi, the panning / zooming presentation app; I just opted for simple presentation mode.

Check out the SSG Lightning Talk or view it in the iframe below (use arrow keys to advance).

This presentation needs work (never mind the fact that using my new machine to do a presentation caused a bit of a fumble). I spent a lot of time futzing with the tech, which should’ve gone into tuning the content. I’m finding a bit of a problem determining the right level to cover with SSGs. There are a lot of moving pieces around generators, layouts, and hosting, plus trying to explore the “why” of SSGs and what kind of solutions they apply to.

Hekyll was an interesting experiment. I like that I can keep my presentations on GitHub directly. Theming needs work - or my design + CSS skills need work, depending on how you think about it :)

I also ended up demo’ing Prose.io (read Development Seed’s intro blog post), which is a web-based content editor for GitHub. So, if you’re creating / hosting content using GitHub’s native pages functionality (which uses the Jekyll static site generator), it means you can edit your content online in a friendly, Markdown-aware environment in your browser.