KiSSES: Keep Static Site Examples Simple

I don’t know about you, but every time that I check out a static site generator’s example GitHub page, I’m both over and underwhelmed at the same time. On one hand, the Github page often has great technical details and depth to allow me to leverage and extend the example to fit my needs. On the other hand, feature’s such as GitHub Action integration, or deploying to GitHub pages is often left to the engineer to figure out. And in some cases, the example site is not longer in line with current revisions of the tool!

And look, I know that every project is different, and that your preferred static site generator probably has better documentation and examples than what I’ve seen. But of the projects that I have seen, GitHub pages deployment or recommended project repository layouts are sidelined to focus on technical documentation.

Is this good or bad? I don’t know. Am I too unexperienced to work within these constraints? Maybe. But I can’t be the only engineer to have faced these issues. And for projects aimed at quickly and rapidly creating websites from limited format text documents (e.g., Markup, ReStructured Text), I’d think that features such as starter or template GitHub repositories would be more common.

Because of my frustrations, I’ve released two example GitHub repositories for two popular static site generators: MkDocs and Sphinx. The goal with these repositories is to be focussed on a minimal project using the static site generator, that builds into a Read The Docs theme compatible website, and provide supporting tooling regarding formatting of the underlying formatting language. It also provides the tooling needed to deploy to GitHub Pages both from the command line and via GitHub Actions (both are powered by the ghp-import project).

Now I understand that my examples are not going to be complete to everyone. So I’d like to open my issue boards to the community to suggest how to better improve these examples. I think it’s a real shame that better examples of minimal static sites don’t exist, and I think projects like mine address low hanging fruit on their issue boards.

MkDocs example site: https://github.com/NicholasSynovic/example_mkdocs

Sphinx example site: https://github.com/NicholasSynovic/example_sphinx