● Static Site Generators

337 2026-07-24 note

A static site generator takes markdown and templates and compiles them into plain HTML files with no server-side code and no database. For a digital gardenA digital garden is a website that grows in public instead of publishing in the finished, dated-post format of a blog. Entries get revised in place, start rough and get filled in over time, and are organized by association rather… that's meant to be worked on continuously, the boring reliability is a great asset.

I use 11ty (Eleventy) instead of Hugo, Jekyll, or a hand-rolled build script. The Eleventy InterlinkerObsidian-style wikilinks, backlinks, and embeds for Eleventy. Used for both dead-link reporting and stub-generation. The resolvingFns is why I use this instead of the lighter eleventy-plugin-backlinks alternative. It makes the hover-preview excerpts on wikilinks possible. The dead-link-to-stub pipeline is the… is great for wiki-links plus backlinks are most of what this site needed to not be a plain blog. The frontmatter schema, the type-as-tag grouping entries on the homepage, and the symbol systemI'm using single-character symbols, one per type as a quick visual cue: | type | symbol | example | | -------- | ------ | ------------------------ | | quote | > | on-writing-daily | | bookmark | ⚹ | eleventy-interlinker |… all lean on 11ty's data cascade doing the boring parts.

Nothing is dynamic. Search has to be either client-side JS or an external index.

The stubA problem that wiki-linked digital garden run into is figuring out what happens when you reference a note that doesn't exist on disk yet. A traditional website would 404. This site turns it into a stub instead. A stub is… pipeline means a link doesn't resolve until its stub file exists on disk, so npm run build has to run Eleventy twice with the stub script in between, first pass to write the dead-link report, second pass once those files exist. A little inelegant but not worth a custom plugin until the site is large enough for that cost to matter.