CategoryStatic Generators

July 13, 2016 — The benefits of UI design systems are now well known. They lead to more cohesive, consistent user experiences. They speed up your team’s workflow, allowing you to launch more stuff while saving huge amounts of time and money in the process. They establish a common vocabulary between disciplines, resulting in a more collaborative and constructive workflow. They make browser, device, performance, and accessibility testing easier. And they serve as a solid foundation to build upon over time, helping your organization to more easily adapt to the ever-shifting web landscape. This article provides a detailed guide to building and maintaining atomic design systems with Pattern Lab 2. Read more…

February 23, 2016 — It’s not exactly a new subject, but lately I’ve had reason to revisit the skill of content modeling in my team’s work. Our experience has reached a point where the limitations of how we practice are starting to become clear. Our most common issue is that people tend to tie themselves and their mental models to a chosen platform and its conventions. Instead of teaching people how to model content, we end up teaching them how to model content in Drupal, or how to model content in WordPress. But I’d prefer that we approach it from a focus on the best interests of users, regardless of which platform said content will end up in. Read more…

November 16, 2015 — Static site generators are quickly becoming a big part of the professional website builder’s toolbox. A new static website generator seems to pop up every week. Figuring out which one to use can be like a walk in the jungle. Read more…

November 2, 2015 — At StaticGen, our open-source directory of static website generators, we’ve kept track of more than a hundred generators for more than a year now, and we’ve seen both the volume and popularity of these projects take off incredibly on GitHub during that time, going from just 50 to more than 100 generators and a total of more than 100,000 stars for static website generator repositories. Influential design-focused companies such as Nest and MailChimp now use static website generators for their primary websites. Vox Media has built a whole publishing system around Middleman. Carrot, a large New York agency and part of the Vice empire, builds websites for some of the world’s largest brands with its own open-source generator, Roots. And several of Google’s properties, such as “A Year In Search” and Web Fundamentals, are static. Read more…

August 1, 2014 — In this article, we’ll walk through the quickest way to set up a Jekyll powered blog, how to avoid common problems with using Jekyll, and much more. Read more…