How is this site generated? Which CMS (Content Management System) are you using?

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Most of the site is comprised of static HTML web pages, which are uploaded to the web-site as they are, after being generated using templates, data, and programs. The site’s sources are public and kept in a public version control repository, which also contains some automated tests and makes use of a continuous integration service.

In modern web developer jargon, one can say I use a custom static site generator (SSG). The blanket licence for the sources is CC-by-nc-sa for texts, and the ASL 2.0 for code.

While I am not ashamed of the site’s sources, they have gone through a long history and legacy. I remain a big fan of static site generation, but there are probably some better approaches out there for that. Furthermore, often it is simpler to just write something of your own using a good preprocessor or a template system, a good build system and some code glue. However, for me, converting to something else would be too time-consuming, and I've already found some faults in some existing popular-and-open-source static site generators that I tried.

You can find a partial list of technologies that have been used for it.

Some people asked if I am running a content management system ("CMS") on my hosting's web-service, and the answer is "no". I am not running WordPress, MovableType, Drupal, Joomla, MediaWiki, or whatever. As far as the web-server is concerned, my site is static files that are served directly from the filesystem. Moreover, these files contain substantial amounts of repetitive markup and code.

Why are some of your sites static (and generated by static site generators) rather than use server-side scripting (e.g.: PHP)?

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  1. Static sites require less maintenance than sites with Server-side scripting given the latter are potentially more prone to security exploits.

  2. Static sites likely load and run faster

  3. I can afford to spend more computer time of my local workstation to minify the served data, or otherwise improve the user-experience.

  4. From my experience, source codes of generated static sites, that are typically kept in version-control repositories (e.g: git ones), tend to get misplaced less frequently than those of sites using content-management systems, which are usually kept in SQL databases.

  5. Tom Hummel’s Four Ways to Build Web Apps is a useful overview.