Still - A Simple Static Site Generator

What is Still?

still is a super-minimal static site generator designed for small personal blogs.

It converts Markdown files into simple HTML pages using Python's Markdown module and combines them with a header and footer to produce fast, portable, brutally minimal websites.

The goal of still is to make it as simple as possible to publish a blog.

Features include:

• Minimal — just Markdown, HTML, and a build script
• Fast — builds in milliseconds
• Simple file structure
• Front-matter-style metadata for posts (title, date)
• Auto-generated homepage with post list
• Static output to /public (ready to upload anywhere)
• Bring-your-own CSS
• Optional RSS feed generation

How I Built This Site with Still & GitHub Actions

It is easy to use still to generate a website of your own and host it on GitHub Pages for free. Below I will walk through the steps of how I did this in less than 10 minutes.

1. Generate a New Repository Using Still as Template

Go to the still repo and click on "Use this template" followed by "Create a new repository", which will preconfigure your own still repo with the necessary files and the still project structure.

From here, you are free to edit the various markdown files, as well as the header.html, footer.html, and style.css. If you would like, you may configure the necessary global variables in still.py for optional RSS feed generation.

2. Configure GitHub Actions for CI/CD

CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery) is a DevOps practice that automates the software development lifecycle using a pipeline to build, test, and release software more frequently and reliably.

-Google AI Overview

Basically, whenever you would push a change to your remote repo, GitHub Actions automatically tests that the site builds correctly, and then deploys it to GitHub Pages for hosting. This means that in order to write a new post or update the site, all one must do is make changes to their local repo and push it to remote.

You can see an example in my .github/workflows/pages.yml for the configuration I used to build and deploy this site.

From there, all that needs to be done is to configure GitHub Pages to use GitHub Actions as source. From your GitHub repo, navigate to "Settings -> Pages" and set "Source" to "GitHub Actions". That's it.

3. A Note on GitHub Pages

In order to use GitHub Pages to host your site for free, there are a couple requirements:

1. The repository must be public.
2. The repository must be named YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME.github.io

If you would like to use a custom URL rather than a subdomain of github.io, this is also configurable in "Settings -> Pages", although I will not explain that process in this post.

That's all you need to host your own website! Thank you for reading and Godspeed.

-Weston