Static Site Generators: A Beginner's Guide

Static-site generators are a key element of the modern Jamstack architecture. We explore the standout features of seven leading static-site generators.

The Jamstack (JavaScript, APIs, and Markup) is increasingly becoming the development stack of choice on the Web. The title on the Jamstack website suggests that the Jamstack is “the modern way to build websites and apps” and that it “delivers better performance”.

Performance is certainly one of the benefits the Jamstack brings to the table, together with better security, scalability, and developer experience. Sites built on this type of architecture make use of pre-rendered static pages served over CDNs, can get data from multiple sources, and replace traditional servers and their databases with micro service APIs.

What makes possible the creation of static sites quickly and relatively painlessly are static site generators (SSGs).

There are tons of static site generators in a range of programming languages, such as JavaScript, Ruby, Go, and more. You’ll find an exhaustive, unfiltered list on staticsitegenerators.net, but if you’d like something more manageable, check out the Jamstack website”s list, where you can filter static site generators by name or by the number of GitHub stars.

In this article, I’m going to list seven popular static site generators and their main features, so that you can form a better idea of which one among them would be a good fit for your project.

What Are Static Site Generators?

A common CMS (content management system) — like WordPress, for instance — builds the web page dynamically as it’s being requested by the client: it assembles all the data from the database, and processes the content through a template engine. In contrast, while static site generators also process pages through a template engine, they handle the build process before the pages are requested by the client, meaning that they’re ready to serve when requested. All that’s hosted online is static assets, which makes sites much more lightweight and faster to serve.

To learn more about the differences between a traditional CMS and a static site generator, and about the benefits of using an SSG, check out Craig Buckler’s article on “7 Reasons to Use a Static Site Generator”.

But, what about all the good things that come with CMSs, like content creation and update by non developers, team collaboration around content, and so on? Enter the headless CMS.

A headless CMS is one that has only has a back end. There’s no front end to display the content. Its only job is to manage content, but it also provides an API that another front end can use to retrieve the data entered into it.

This way, the editorial team, for example, can continue working from their familiar, user-friendly admin interface and the content they produce or update is just one data source among others that static site generators can access via the exposed API. Popular headless CMS software include Strapi, Sanity, and Contentful. Also, WordPress has a REST API that allows devs to use it as a headless CMS.

So, the modern Jamstack tooling makes it possible to build a statically-served website and still get the benefits of a content management system.

Now, let’s go through some static site generator options.

• Gatsby
• Next.js
• Hugo
• Nuxt.js
• Jekyll
• Eleventy
• VuePress
• Nuxt.js or VuePress?

#javascript #api #gatsby #nuxt #next

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Building a Static Website with Hugo

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How To Create User-Generated Content? [A Simple Guide To Grow Your Brand]

In this digital world, online businesses aspire to catch the attention of users in a modern and smarter way. To achieve it, they need to traverse through new approaches. Here comes to spotlight is the user-generated content or UGC.

What is user-generated content?
“ It is the content by users for users.”

Generally, the UGC is the unbiased content created and published by the brand users, social media followers, fans, and influencers that highlight their experiences with the products or services. User-generated content has superseded other marketing trends and fallen into the advertising feeds of brands. Today, more than 86 percent of companies use user-generated content as part of their marketing strategy.

In this article, we have explained the ten best ideas to create wonderful user-generated content for your brand. Let’s start without any further ado.

1. Content From Social Media Platforms
   In the year 2020, there are 3.81 million people actively using social media around the globe. That is the reason social media content matters. Whenever users look at the content on social media that is posted by an individual, then they may be influenced by their content. Perhaps, it can be used to gain more customers or followers on your social media platforms.

Generally, social media platforms help the brand to generate content for your users. Any user content that promotes your brand on the social media platform is the user-generated content for your business. When users create and share content on social media, they get 28% higher engagement than a standard company post.

Furthermore, you can embed your social media feed on your website also. you can use the Social Stream Designer WordPress plugin that will integrate various social media feeds from different social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and many more. With this plugin, you can create a responsive wall on your WordPress website or blog in a few minutes. In addition to this, the plugin also provides more than 40 customization options to make your social stream feeds more attractive.

2. Consumer Survey
   The customer survey provides powerful insights you need to make a better decision for your business. Moreover, it is great user-generated content that is useful for identifying unhappy consumers and those who like your product or service.

In general, surveys can be used to figure out attitudes, reactions, to evaluate customer satisfaction, estimate their opinions about different problems. Another benefit of customer surveys is that collecting outcomes can be quick. Within a few minutes, you can design and load a customer feedback survey and send it to your customers for their response. From the customer survey data, you can find your strengths, weaknesses, and get the right way to improve them to gain more customers.

3. Run Contests
   A contest is a wonderful way to increase awareness about a product or service. Contest not just helps you to enhance the volume of user-generated content submissions, but they also help increase their quality. However, when you create a contest, it is important to keep things as simple as possible.

Additionally, it is the best way to convert your brand leads to valuable customers. The key to running a successful contest is to make sure that the reward is fair enough to motivate your participation. If the product is relevant to your participant, then chances are they were looking for it in the first place, and giving it to them for free just made you move forward ahead of your competitors. They will most likely purchase more if your product or service satisfies them.

Furthermore, running contests also improve the customer-brand relationship and allows more people to participate in it. It will drive a real result for your online business. If your WordPress website has Google Analytics, then track contest page visits, referral traffic, other website traffic, and many more.

4. Review And Testimonials
   Customer reviews are a popular user-generated content strategy. One research found that around 68% of customers must see at least four reviews before trusting a brand. And, approximately 40 percent of consumers will stop using a business after they read negative reviews.

The business reviews help your consumers to make a buying decision without any hurdle. While you may decide to remove all the negative reviews about your business, those are still valuable user-generated content that provides honest opinions from real users. Customer feedback can help you with what needs to be improved with your products or services. This thing is not only beneficial to the next customer but your business as a whole.

Reviews are powerful as the platform they are built upon. That is the reason it is important to gather reviews from third-party review websites like Google review, Facebook review, and many more, or direct reviews on a website. It is the most vital form of feedback that can help brands grow globally and motivate audience interactions.

However, you can also invite your customers to share their unique or successful testimonials. It is a great way to display your products while inspiring others to purchase from your website.

5. Video Content
   A great video is a video that is enjoyed by visitors. These different types of videos, such as 360-degree product videos, product demo videos, animated videos, and corporate videos. The Facebook study has demonstrated that users spend 3x more time watching live videos than normal videos. With the live video, you can get more user-created content.

Moreover, Instagram videos create around 3x more comments rather than Instagram photo posts. Instagram videos generally include short videos posted by real customers on Instagram with the tag of a particular brand. Brands can repost the stories as user-generated content to engage more audiences and create valid promotions on social media.

Similarly, imagine you are browsing a YouTube channel, and you look at a brand being supported by some authentic customers through a small video. So, it will catch your attention. With the videos, they can tell you about the branded products, especially the unboxing videos displaying all the inside products and how well it works for them. That type of video is enough to create a sense of desire in the consumers.

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#how to get more user generated content #importance of user generated content #user generated content #user generated content advantages #user generated content best practices #user generated content pros and cons

Static Code Analysis: What It Is? How to Use It?

Static code analysis refers to the technique of approximating the runtime behavior of a program. In other words, it is the process of predicting the output of a program without actually executing it.

Lately, however, the term “Static Code Analysis” is more commonly used to refer to one of the applications of this technique rather than the technique itself — program comprehension — understanding the program and detecting issues in it (anything from syntax errors to type mismatches, performance hogs likely bugs, security loopholes, etc.). This is the usage we’d be referring to throughout this post.

“The refinement of techniques for the prompt discovery of error serves as well as any other as a hallmark of what we mean by science.”

• J. Robert Oppenheimer

Outline

We cover a lot of ground in this post. The aim is to build an understanding of static code analysis and to equip you with the basic theory, and the right tools so that you can write analyzers on your own.

We start our journey with laying down the essential parts of the pipeline which a compiler follows to understand what a piece of code does. We learn where to tap points in this pipeline to plug in our analyzers and extract meaningful information. In the latter half, we get our feet wet, and write four such static analyzers, completely from scratch, in Python.

Note that although the ideas here are discussed in light of Python, static code analyzers across all programming languages are carved out along similar lines. We chose Python because of the availability of an easy to use ast module, and wide adoption of the language itself.

How does it all work?

Before a computer can finally “understand” and execute a piece of code, it goes through a series of complicated transformations:

As you can see in the diagram (go ahead, zoom it!), the static analyzers feed on the output of these stages. To be able to better understand the static analysis techniques, let’s look at each of these steps in some more detail:

Scanning

The first thing that a compiler does when trying to understand a piece of code is to break it down into smaller chunks, also known as tokens. Tokens are akin to what words are in a language.

A token might consist of either a single character, like (, or literals (like integers, strings, e.g., 7, Bob, etc.), or reserved keywords of that language (e.g, def in Python). Characters which do not contribute towards the semantics of a program, like trailing whitespace, comments, etc. are often discarded by the scanner.

Python provides the tokenize module in its standard library to let you play around with tokens:

Python

1

import io

2

import tokenize

3

4

code = b"color = input('Enter your favourite color: ')"

5

6

for token in tokenize.tokenize(io.BytesIO(code).readline):

7

    print(token)

Python

1

TokenInfo(type=62 (ENCODING),  string='utf-8')

2

TokenInfo(type=1  (NAME),      string='color')

3

TokenInfo(type=54 (OP),        string='=')

4

TokenInfo(type=1  (NAME),      string='input')

5

TokenInfo(type=54 (OP),        string='(')

6

TokenInfo(type=3  (STRING),    string="'Enter your favourite color: '")

7

TokenInfo(type=54 (OP),        string=')')

8

TokenInfo(type=4  (NEWLINE),   string='')

9

TokenInfo(type=0  (ENDMARKER), string='')

(Note that for the sake of readability, I’ve omitted a few columns from the result above — metadata like starting index, ending index, a copy of the line on which a token occurs, etc.)

#code quality #code review #static analysis #static code analysis #code analysis #static analysis tools #code review tips #static code analyzer #static code analysis tool #static analyzer

An Introduction to Static Site Generators

Websites can be of 2 types: static and dynamic. For static types, when user requests a file, server sends the file and user can see it. Every page is hand coded in html. In a dynamic type, When user requests, content is generated and server builds the page then sends it to the user. Generally managed by CMS like Wordpress or Joomla.

Static site generator (SSG) bridges the gap between static HTML sites and CMS based sites (like Wordpress). It provides better performance of static sites and we do not have to write HTML for content of our site.

Think of a static site generator as a script which takes in data, content and templates, processes them, and outputs a folder full of all the resultant pages and assets.

-Phil Hawksworth

In short, SSGs bring good of both worlds together.

Why use SSG ?

1. Security

Static websites do not have a database and all our server does is returns the file asked by user.

Our server becomes dumb (doesn’t use logic to construct page) so no security issue to exploit.

2. Performance

Static websites perform better and load faster because the page isn’t constructed at run time.

3. Version Control

Our website can live in a version controlled environment, meaning if you make a mistake you can go back to a previous version in one command.

4. Scaling

When the number of users on a dynamic website increase it would mean to efficiently scale the website to ensure every user’s page is served as quickly as possible while for static sites thats not a issue because our work is pre-done. Our website pages are already made and we just have to provide them.

#webdevelopment #programming #static-site-generator #web-development #static-website #html #ssg #website

How To Take Help Of Referencing Generator

APA Referencing Generator

Many students use APA style as the key citation style in their assignment in university or college. Although, many people find it quite difficult to write the reference of the source. You ought to miss the names and dates of authors. Hence, APA referencing generator is important for reducing the burden of students. They can now feel quite easy to do the assignments on time.

The functioning of APA referencing generator

If you are struggling hard to write the APA referencing then you can take the help of APA referencing generator. It will create an excellent list. You are required to enter the information about the source. Just ensure that the text is credible and original. If you will copy references then it is a copyright violation.

You can use a referencing generator in just a click. It will generate the right references for all the sources. You are required to organize in alphabetical order. The generator will make sure that you will get good grades.

How to use APA referencing generator?

Select what is required to be cited such as journal, book, film, and others. You can choose the type of required citations list and enter all the required fields. The fields are dates, author name, title, editor name, and editions, name of publishers, chapter number, page numbers, and title of journals. You can click for reference to be generated and you will get the desired result.

Chicago Referencing Generator

Do you require the citation style? You can rely on Chicago Referencing Generator and will ensure that you will get the right citation in just a click. The generator is created to provide solutions to students to cite their research paper in Chicago style. It has proved to be the quickest and best citation generator on the market. The generator helps to sort the homework issues in few seconds. It also saves a lot of time and energy.

This tool helps researchers, professional writers, and students to manage and generate text citation essays. It will help to write Chicago style in a fast and easy way. It also provides details and directions for formatting and cites resources.

So, you must stop wasting the time and can go for Chicago Referencing Generator or APA referencing generator. These citation generators will help to solve the problem of citation issues. You can easily create citations by using endnotes and footnotes.

So, you can generate bibliographies, references, in-text citations, and title pages. These are fully automatic referencing style. You are just required to enter certain details about the citation and you will get the citation in the proper and required format.

So, if you are feeling any problem in doing assignment then you can take the help of assignment help.
If you require help for Assignment then livewebtutors is the right place for you. If you see our prices, you will observe that they are actually very affordable. Also, you can always expect a discount. Our team is capable and versatile enough to offer you exactly what you need, the best services for the prices you can afford.

read more:- Are you struggling to write a bibliography? Use Harvard referencing generator

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