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 boxI 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!
Quarto is probably the most unique one I’ve seen so far. Thanks for the input.
In case you’re familiar with Obsidian, there’s Quartz: quartz.jzhao.xyz/ Runs in docker too, practically zero config to start
Thanks for the recommendation!
Zola. 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.
Thanks!
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.
Thanks for the heads up. That feels like the same roadblock I got with 11ty. It ran OK on markdown, but one you dig into how wide the customizations go I couldn’t keep up.
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.
Good to know. Thanks!
Thanks for the recommendation. I’ll definitely take a look at Hugo.
I used an LLM… Took me about an hour to set up a cicd pipeline in cloudflare pages which pulls code on change from my GitHub
The LLM guided me through that part too…
Then I used Cursor to make the thing. It actually performed really well. Just told it to make it look like medium.com since I like that clean look.
Entirely ai generated, blog post too.
Another deer!? 😱
Lol yes another gd deer, just got the car back yesterday.
Seconded. OP, if you can write Markdown, Hugo will turn it into a website.
Thank you for the recommendation!
And best of luck with the repair. That’s a crazy bill estimate.
Do you know if hugo blogs can federate?
It has RSS built-in, but since it is a static site generator, it does not support ActivityPub out of the box. But I do think I have seen implementations with some custom JavaScript.
No, hugo does not federate.
It’s a GUI app that runs on your local system and pushes sites to a server.
I’m planning on porting my Wordpress site to this. I haven’t used it yet but based on what I’ve read it will be easier than Hugo.
Thank you for the recommendation!
This might be what you’re looking for: Zola
Single binary that lets you keep your markdown/config in git and just build it from the git clone folder you’re in at the time.
I know some people that have moved off of Hugo to this, and Alex from the Selfhosted podcast recently talked about it on their show.
Thank you for the recommendation! Zola looks promising.
I think mkdocs is easier than hugo but less flexible in terms of capability. However it serves all my needs (list of webpages accessible from a central frontpage)
Thanks!
Try Publii. It does everything for you. You can even set up the FTP upload.
Good to know. Thank you for the recommendation!
I like using Hugo at present
Thanks for the recommendation!
Use Publii, it has a WYSIWYG editor, a block editor and a markdown editor. It creates the files on your PC and can upload it to your server. Just point your webserver to the uploaded folder.
Very beginner friendly ☝🏻
Thanks for the recommendation!
I found pelican to be quite simple to start with and depending on how deep you want to go it can be quite customizable. Being proficient in python helps.
That looks neat. Thanks!
