Static site generation definitely predates Jekyl. If anything I think Jekyl would be better flagged in the timeline as the beginning of a renaissance for static site generation. I can think of two eras when it was in vogue before that
To give an example, my team was doing this in the early 00's on some major brand websites to eek performance out of stacks originally built on either PHP or Perl with MySQL Cluster (as in NDB) as the backend.
We fired crawlers both on article creation and periodically overnight that browsed the dynamic site dumping out to a static "cache". Initially this was html chunks which was bolted together by Apache SSI includes. (eg header, footer, menu, content, and a wrapper). Later that evolved in to storing in Memcached with a simple Memcached implementation frontend wrapper to cache on demand.
If I wind my memory back even further to late 90s early 00s I remember pre-Web2 tools that would give you a local desktop based CMS and site generator that pumped out flat files and pushed over FTP. These were especially commonly used by graphic designers making the transition from print design to web for things like brochure sites.
Yes, I feel like Jekyll was the first to make static sites "cool". Maybe because of github that made it super easy to create a site based on Jekyll, without having to compile it locally then upload to FTP or whatever.
In the early days, it seemed like static sites were for programmers who didn't really understand the web, or only had hosting for static content.
Yeah definitely. I did some work with a really ancient Python SSG called rest2web that was around since ~2004ish, so several years before Jekyll even started
To give an example, my team was doing this in the early 00's on some major brand websites to eek performance out of stacks originally built on either PHP or Perl with MySQL Cluster (as in NDB) as the backend.
We fired crawlers both on article creation and periodically overnight that browsed the dynamic site dumping out to a static "cache". Initially this was html chunks which was bolted together by Apache SSI includes. (eg header, footer, menu, content, and a wrapper). Later that evolved in to storing in Memcached with a simple Memcached implementation frontend wrapper to cache on demand.
If I wind my memory back even further to late 90s early 00s I remember pre-Web2 tools that would give you a local desktop based CMS and site generator that pumped out flat files and pushed over FTP. These were especially commonly used by graphic designers making the transition from print design to web for things like brochure sites.