Some comments on other Static Site Generator

Constructing a simple homepage, perhaps with a blog and some images can be done in a few hours, possibly days with a tool like wordpress. To make a homepage satisfying some special requirements takes a bit of planning of content and how it can be served.

I have tried a few tools to produce an homepage for an university researcher, but I observed in late 2018 some limitations where I desired simpler handling or more flexibility for my use:

• Not easily (i.e. out of the box) to make work with markdown (e.g. the often used WordPress),

• Hard to exclude commercial interestsespecially from the companies and agencies which are trying to convince us that they constantly improve their service to serve us better and force us to change our code accordingly
  
  and connections to unwanted services(for example, WordPress seems to link Google Analytics and similar by default
  
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• Missing integration with BibTex to produce references and a list of publications from BibTex files,

I prefer to work in the language I know already and not to learn a new set of obscure quirks (e.g. WordPress, Sprinkles), and shy away from approaches batteries included (e.g. Jekyll or Hakyll; a similar comment) by the author of an Haskell based approach, forcing users to learn lots of detail, and look for extensible and composable tools, following the initial Unix philosophywhatever composable means for a site generator?

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I was very impressed with static site generators, e.g. SitePipe which demonstrated how much functionality is available in packages (e.g. from Hackage)The predecessor SitePipe proveded some inspiration for SSG.

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I later learned of the Multimarkdown-CMS, which seams also to show how much can be achieved with current, existing packages. Unfortunately, it converted into a closed system for the Mac.

In searching for how to adapt the Tufte style to the design of a home page I found Jekyll, which uses the Ruby environment but includes pandoc and Tufte packages adapted to pandoc. It demonstrated that a webpage Tufte style is possible.