2mo ago

Static site generator for an idiot who doesn't want to learn a new templating language just to have a blog?

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!

62 comments

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.

Zola. Similar to Hugo, but newer and written in Rust.
https://www.getzola.org/
- 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!

https://getpublii.com/
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!

I think you might like hugo
It's what I use for my blog
- 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?
  
  No, hugo does not 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.

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 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!

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 like using Hugo at present
- Thanks for the recommendation!

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!

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.
- As the sibling comment says, not a static site generator. If you want to customize pretty much anything about the layout or theming you still need to use Twig, CSS and if you're unlucky JS.
- Thanks for the recommendation. I actually did look at grav a while back, but I can't recall why I moved on. Will give it another pass.

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!

Quartz or mkdocs
- Thanks for the recommendations!

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.
- What templating languages do you know already, and are you running 11ty v3? There are some gotchas around images because (I think) the eleventy-image plugin is enabled by default.
  I've found success running with .webc which is effectively HTML until you need it to be more.
  
  Thank you for the advice! I'll give webc a look before I check out the alternative platforms.
  I don't know or really want to learn anything other than html/css or markdown. The site I'm trying to migrate was raw html/css, and I liked it well enough even though the shortcomings (and argument for template stuff) is very obvious.

My preference is Nikola.
- Thank you for the recommendation!

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.

Docusaurus. It's all markdown.
- Thanks for the rec! Looks awesome; Imma try it :)
  https://docusaurus.io/
  
  Oof. Meta open source. Srsly sus. •͡˘㇁•͡˘
- Will give that a look, thanks!

Relevant comment chain: https://programming.dev/comment/12187727
- Neat, thanks!

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 box

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!

Codeberg Pages if you don't mind a give-or-take weekly 30 min downtime. GitHub Pages if you do. GitLab Pages if you have a creditcard which they require to verify your identity.
- I recently switched to Codeberg Pages and it's the first time I'm hearing about a weekly downtime. Is there somewhere this is documented or I can read more about it?
  
  “Honestly, I am completely unsure how to proceed with the pages server.
  It might be the best idea to deprecate it.”

Quarto.org
https://quarto.org/docs/websites/website-blog.html
- Quarto is probably the most unique one I've seen so far. Thanks for the input.

62 comments