Hi,
I’m interested in setting up a small static-site-generator site. Looked at 11ty recently and feel pretty uncomfortable with the amount of javascript and “funny language” churn just to make some html happen.
Do you know of any alternative that’s simpler / easier / less complicated dependencies? Or do you have an approach to 11ty that you think I should try?
Thanks in advance for any input, it’s appreciated!
https://www.sphinx-doc.org/ + https://pradyunsg.me/furo/ theme + https://myst-parser.readthedocs.io/ markdown parser + https://sphinx-design.readthedocs.io/ extensions.
Just drop all your markdown files in a directory and run
sphinx-build. Highly customizable but also works out of the boxZola. Similar to Hugo, but newer and written in Rust.
I used Zola for a while, but at the end of the day there wasnt enough themes available that fit what I was looking for. I ended up messing with the templating engine to get what I needed.
I suggest OP choose Hugo over Zola, in the hopes that they find a theme that suits them best and for the most part prevents them from having to touch templating to begin with.
Docusaurus. It’s all markdown.
In case you’re familiar with Obsidian, there’s Quartz: quartz.jzhao.xyz/ Runs in docker too, practically zero config to start
I’m looking for something similar that I can host in blue host, but all there is, apparently, is WordPress (hell no), joomla and drupal, and these are certainly not static.
That’s like the OG crew of web content haha. I used to be pretty big on Wordpress, but then two of my sites got compromised (through a plugin probably?), and of course the recent kerfluffle going on.
I want to second Pelican for Python. Really easy to set up and get going. No need to learn a complicated templating language (it’s jinja2, which is what everything uses).
Thanks for the recommendation!
I did try setting up 11ty, despite my misgivings over node.js. Using Markdown went OK, except it wouldn’t render explicit <img> tag parameters to allow me to do one-off formatting.
Quarto is probably the most unique one I’ve seen so far. Thanks for the input.
I like using Hugo at present
Thanks for the recommendation!
Have you checked out grav https://learn.getgrav.org/17/basics/what-is-grav
https://github.com/getgrav/grav
I use it just to make simple markdown sites for info like my gaming servers or if I feel like making a random blog post
Technically Grav is not a static site generator, it is just a flat file cms. It means there is no need to generate all the files of website and upload them to server each time you write a post. I have no idea why people like static sites for blogging.
Use rsync and only upload the files that have changed.
I use Hugo and I’ve been pretty happy with it. It has a lot of layout templates you can use out of the box so you don’t need to learn a new templating language unless you want to do customizations. I write blogs in markdown and it’s automatically rendered and published.
But as soon as you do want to customize it, you’re stuck learning one of the most esoteric languages that wasn’t meant as a joke.
I used Hugo for my portfolio site, and it’s great if you like an existing theme, but making one from scratch is a challenge. The documentation is unclear and there’s a chicken and egg problem about how to learn Hugo.
The go templating is OK, I prefer other syntax but it works.
