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Slides on Simplified Saaze

This very blog is using Simplified Saaze as a static site generator. I.e., I write my blog posts in Markdown, then Simplified Saaze converts them to plain HTML and CSS.

1. Brief history: In May 2021 I moved from WordPress to the static site generator Saaze. See post Moved Blog To eklausmeier.goip.de. I was particularly attracted by the simplicity of Saaze. However, a number of features were missing:

  1. being able to move the blog around under different root directories
  2. showing math formulas using MathJax

I added those two mssing features to Saaze.

I noticed that I could improve the speed of Saaze quite significantly. Furthermore, the code of Saaze could be stripped of unnecessary complexities, but still retaining the old logic. This led to a modified version of Saaze, which I called Simplified Saaze. Simplified Saaze has fewer lines of code than Saaze. Despite this, it is almost two orders of magnitude faster than the original.

See

  1. Making Static Site Generator 30-Times Faster
  2. Making Static Site Generator 500-Times Faster
  3. Performance Comparison Saaze vs. Hugo vs. Zola

Just out of curiosity I wanted to know how much slower Simplified Saaze is than Hugo. Hugo self advertises itself as "The world’s fastest framework for building websites". Hugo is written in the compiled language Go, while Simplified Saaze is written in the interpreted language PHP. I expected that Hugo would blow Simplified Saaze out of the water.

To my great surprise the opposite was the case. Simplified Saaze was one order of magnitude faster than Hugo. I didn't expect that.

I tested against Zola. Still, Simplified Saaze was faster by a factor than Zola.

There are at least two other static site generators, which are also faster than Hugo and Zola: they are called

  1. Blade
  2. Nift

So my findings are not entirely surprising.

2. Conferences. Besides reporting about my findings on this very blog, I offered slides to the following conferences:

  1. PHP conference in Berlin in 2021
  2. Dutch PHP conference in 2022
  3. IPC Berlin 2022
  4. Forum PHP 2022
  5. Frontmania 2022
  6. Longhorn PHP 2022 in Texas
  7. PHP UK Conference 2023
  8. Build Stuff conference 2022
  9. Infobip Shift 2023

All the conferences rejected the slides. This is not entirely uncommon, as the presenter is paid all traveling and hotel costs for the conference. However, the organizers of PHP conference in Berlin asked me to publish my findings in their magazine called "PHP Magazin". It was published there.

3. Slides. Here are the slides.

A Static Site Generator in PHP, Faster Than Hugo or Zola

4. Themes. There are a number of themes for Simplified Saaze:

  1. Saaze example, a pure example theme, simple to use and modify
  2. J-Pilot, showcasing an open-source software project and having a hierarchical menu
  3. Koehntopp, a blog for a computer scientist
  4. NukeKlaus, a blog for a nuclear power engineer
  5. Mobility, a multilingual site for promoting software for battery management used in electric vehicles
  6. Vonhoff, a German site for a doctoral student
  7. Paternoster, a blog of a web developer
  8. Panorama, a site for a restaurant showing their rooms and their menu
  9. Lemire, a site for a computer science professor
  10. Wendt, a German political blog
  11. Myra West, a personal blog about psychology, friendship, and personal journaling