a static site is a site with no fancy clicky things, signups, comments, just plain html. writing a raw html page for your blog makes it load very fast, but there's a lot of typing involved when designing it. markdown is a simpler and faster way to write pages, and bearclaw converts those markdown files to html for you, with your style template.

no node-modules, no react, no fancy stuff or cool emojis. it just works.