Ask HN: What's a good static site generator to use for a blog in 2018? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's a good static site generator to use for a blog in 2018?

60 pointsartemis73125 comments

Hello HN community,

I've been meaning to start blogging for a while now but I never got around to it. I do have some time this weekend and I thought I'll give it a whirl then.

I recently read about Hugo and I was wondering if it's good enough for me to start with? Has anyone used it? How has your experience been so far?

My posts will mainly focus on little programming tidbits that I learn while I'm working so yes, it will involve code snippets. Markdown support is a huge pro for me as well. I am aware of Jekyll as it's one of the biggest players in this segment but everyone's been complaining about its speed which is why I'm not leaning towards it.

If anyone's got some advice on what SSG I can use, fire away. If you can, highlight both the pros and cons so I can make an informed decision on this.

Thank you for your time! Cheers!

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This is likely to be an unpopular answer, but the best choice is probably WordPress. I just used it to generate a network of about 40 static sites because (1) it has literally thousands of beautiful, professionally-developed themes for free; (2) same goes for plugins; (3) it's easy to hack if need be; and (4) it probably has one of the easiest-to-use and most-complete content editors, capable of creating both pages and blog entries, upload media, cropping images, etc.; (5) it has a variety of static site generation plugins to choose from; and (6) I spent hours looking at hugo, pelican, etc. and realized that any minor qualm I had with any of these common solutions was more or less addressed by the large and robust community of WordPress developers and enthusiasts.

It's not a sexy answer, but it's practical. Just make sure you don't leave the WordPress site you use to generate static content open to the public.

What’s your recommended method to make WP static? Have any of the other plugins broken for you from making WP static?

I think I ended up using "WP Static HTML Output" (not sure how to make the link citations here on HN, but the URL is https://wordpress.org/plugins/static-html-output-plugin/ ) because it exports to S3, which is where I was hosting the static sites.

its not static tho, which invalidates it from this list.

The fact that you mention it has a content-editor indicates you're not using it in a static fashion.

(Correction, I hadn't realised you could use it in a static way... I last touched WordPress back in the dark ages!)

The idea is to use WordPress as the generator: Not the generated site.

The output is static HTML files uploaded to S3, that makes it a static site generator in such a setup. That it has a dynamic component for the editing process only doesn't change that.

I also recommend Wordpress with HardyPress. You can use Wordpress to create content more elegantly than with static plain files, and you can use HardyPress to make the result a fully static site.

I've been running my own blogs / portfolio in the last decade on static sites, from now now I'm using this new combo. Why? With the advent of the headless CMS scene static site generators just lost their unique advantage to spitting out HTML files. And meantime they didn't advance at all on the content creation side.

Creating, managing and distributing content with a CMS is far easier than with a static site generator. And when the final output is the same the choice is obvious.

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with HardyPress nor Wordpress, however I do create themes for Wordpress.

Notes: In my profile the first link is a statically generated site, as well as the others in the About section. The second link is a Wordpress+HardyPress combo and you can check it live the amazing speed it offers.

Will check out HardyPress. Thanks! It might make things easier if I end up with WordPress. Wasn't aware of it :)

I was going to say the same thing, but I would go a step further and say why the heck would you want a static site for a blog in 2018? WordPress is fast, secure, and sooooo easy to use. I'm a professional web developer with 20 years experience and I still use WordPress for my personal blog because it's so simple it saves a ton of time and effort.

There's really no value in "static" websites, if by static you mean pure HTML and CSS. a 512MB server from vultr for $2.50/mo can host dozens of simultaneous visitors on a well-built WordPress site without any slowdown at all.

I'm not a huge fan of WordPress mainly because of the security issues like the others have mentioned.

I've used it a little over a year ago and found things rather unintuitive when it came to setting up plugins. Not sure if it's gotten any better though. But, if you say it's practical, I'll give it another look and see if suits my needs. Thank you!

I use Hugo [0] as a static website generator. They have plenty of themes [1] to choose from. You can still adjust it with basic knowledge in HTML/CSS. Afterward you can chose where to host it. You can use Github Pages [2] for free or pay for a service like DigitalOcean (starting with 5€ a month which scales well) [3]. I wrote a technical cheatsheet [4] on how to setup your own website with these ingredients.

- [0] https://gohugo.io/

- [1] http://themes.gohugo.io/

- [2] https://pages.github.com/

- [3] https://www.digitalocean.com/

- [4] https://www.robinwieruch.de/own-website-in-five-days/

Thanks for the last link. It will surely be helpful :D Hugo seems to be the winner for now.

Hugo is, IMHO, one of the best, most versatile options out there for an SSG. I've been using it since v0.15 (now at 0.37).

I use it for a simple, mostly text, blog (https://kar.ai).

I also use it for an image-heavy company site (https://www.stonelandinc.com).

I also use it for 20+ other sites for clients.

It's undergoing heavy development, so that may be a pro or con, depending.

e.g. Recently they added image processing [0]. This eliminates a python script I was using for the same purpose. It's much faster as well, which matters when regenerating ~1k images.

Down side, documentation & community is still catching up on the newer features.

0: https://gohugo.io/content-management/image-processing/

That's quite some praise there. Definitely reinforces the suggestions others have made as well. 20+ sites is a lot, wow :O

I do not think the blog is going to be too image heavy as I'd like to keep it simple for now but it's definitely a plus to have. Thank you! :)

You have been using it for a long time, right? Have you found any issues in the case when you previously successfully generated a site using an older version, but then install a newer version in a different machine, and you try to generate the site with the "old" source?

That unfortunately has happened to me with other static site generators (breaking changes between versions with no automatic way to resolve them or thorough documentation on the changes to make to the source).

Yes, a couple issues along the way.

Honestly, they were minor enough that I don't remember the specifics, and it didn't take me long to fix.

Since they're not at v1.0 yet, this is to be expected somewhat.

Like many others said, Hugo (https://gohugo.io) is super-awesome.

- Single static binary for any platform for a static site generator; couldn't get better. - The fastest too! - The Go templating is great! It should be fairly easy to pick up by anyone knowing any programming language. I love it especially because it reminds me of Lisp. Example: {{ or (and $a $b) $c }}. (For the folks that are not a fan of Lisp, you can right the same as {{ and $a $b | or $c }}.)

Hugo has inbuilt support for Org mode. But I use more Org syntax than the inbuilt version can support. So I came up with an Emacs package that's an Org exporter backend that exports to Hugo/Blackfriday Markdown + front-matter -- ox-hugo. Folks appreciative of Emacs Org mode might want to check out the homepage https://ox-hugo.scripter.co/ "dog-fooded" by the package itself :)

Everone seems to be raving about Hugo so I'll give it a chance. Let's see how it goes. I did give a quick glance at the templating syntax and it certainly was easy to grasp.

I haven't used Lisp so I'm not sure of how similar they are.

Org mode support seems to be interesting. I've always wanted to pick that up as well. Could you share some good resources you might be aware of? A quick Google search led me to some really old articles. Thank you for bringing this up! I appreciate it :)

> I haven't used Lisp so I'm not sure of how similar they are.

As I said, I can see the syntax to be easy to grasp for anyone knowing any coding language. But Lisp fans would be in for a treat.

In very simple terms, a list function always had the function symbol or identifier as the first element of a list (everything is a list in Lisp), and any number of arguments have to follow after that.

Example of an add function in Lisp:

    (add 1 2)

The same thing in Go templates:

    {{ add 1 2 }}

> Org mode support seems to be interesting. I've always wanted to pick that up as well. Could you share some good resources you might be aware of?

If you use Emacs, the best Org reference is the Org Info manual. Do `C-h i` to open info within Emacs and jump to the Org manual. (You probably aren't using Emacs as you mentioned that you are not familiar with Lisp. So may be this tidbit helps someone else).

If not using Emacs,

- Check out the section on Markup[1] in the official Org manual in HTML. - My blog source in Org[2] - Source of ox-hugo.scripter.co website (100% of the content) from this one Org file [3]

If you don't want to get into too much detail:

    * Heading level 1
    ** Heading level 2, and so on
    *bold* /italics/ _underline_ +strikethrough+
    - list item 1
    - list item 2


    1. ordered list item 1
    2. ordered list item 2

But if you are really getting into Org syntax, here's the mega test file[4] for ox-hugo package that exports to 100's (literally) of Hugo content posts here[5] and gets rendered to HTML by Hugo on https://ox-hugo.scripter.co/test/.

The good news is that you don't have to use Emacs for Org mode, if you plan to use Org mode just like Markdown (and may be a little bit more). If you do use or end up using Emacs, then Org mode is like 1000x Markdown (or may be more :) ).

> Thank you for bringing this up! I appreciate it :)

You are welcome.

Hopefully this response wasn't too much of an information overload.

[1]: https://orgmode.org/manual/Markup.html

[2]: https://gitlab.com/kaushalmodi/kaushalmodi.gitlab.io/raw/mas...

[3]: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kaushalmodi/ox-hugo/master...

[4]: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kaushalmodi/ox-hugo/master...

[5]: https://github.com/kaushalmodi/ox-hugo/tree/master/test/site...

That's pretty good. Can comprehend the syntax pretty easily. It also seems to be a tad bit similar to Jinja's syntax which I'm familiar with so this shouldn't be a problem at all.

Thank you for the detailed explanation though. I appreciate it!

I wasn't even aware that Emacs has a detailed reference built in for Org. Oh well! I should start using Emacs more I guess.

And once again, thank you for all the links. The information dump is great, actually. I've got enough material to put things in place and start working with Org mode.

What counts as "good enough" is such a subjective thing. What works for you will be some function of your needs and technical proficiency. It seems as though you don't have any specific needs, so any of the popular SSGs will be good enough for you. Pick one written in a language you already know, or pick one in a language you would like to learn. Some of the first Ruby code I wrote was a Jekyll plugin that I crudely hacked together. It worked fine. Jekyll is fast enough. Otherwise, there are plenty to choose from[0].

[0]: https://www.staticgen.com/

You're right about the subjectivity. Mainly why I asked everyone about their opinions and experiences so that I could make a decision based on that.

I'm not familiar with Ruby at all as I primarily work on Django. Go has always been on my todo list so I'm mostly leaning towards that for now.

Thank you for the link! I can have a good look at all the available options :D

IMO, just about any will do, but the simplest thing that'll get the job done is probably the best choice - less inertia.

If all you need is a markdown-powered blog, then choose something that does only that. I use Gatsby because I'm familiar with React and it does what I need it to do.

I provide a few small businesses with simple websites to advertise their services (opening times and the like) where wordpress would have been the "traditional" choice, and the main thing I've learned from this is to stay away from loads of plugins or extra functionality until you absolutely need it - it's just more maintenance overhead and things to mess about with/configure. When I update a client site, I simply edit some text and regenerate the site - no plugins to update or config files to edit.

Reply to a deleted comment, mentioning that once the client wants to make edits themselves you end up back at wordpress:

Absolutely correct. Unfortunately, I wouldn't trust most of my clients with a wordpress login so that's never been an option. Coming from wordpress sites that clients have installed all manner of plugins on and I have to fix every two weeks, updating some text files manually is a minor issue. I will never go back to wordpress hell.

I am looking into online editing of the content files to address this issue, but I would rather stick with making the edits myself than see a client site with 5 H1s in a page.

You're right about the minimalist approach. I just want something quick and easy. I shouldn't dread to use it else I will end up dropping it altogether.

I'll be picking up Go as I'm unfamiliar with React and Go seems to be easy to grasp. Thank you for suggesting Gatsby though, I'll give it a shot once I learn React, which should happen this year.

If you are still undecided to go static or not, I would recommend checking out Grav. We were almost going for a static generator for our blog (we were between Hugo and Jekyll) when I stumbled into Grav. It's not static but it is flat-file based, which as it turns out gave to us exactly what we needed, a serverless solution (all your posts are just markdown files and all your settings are yaml files) with powerful templating options.

https://getgrav.org/

EDIT: typos

WOW! This piqued my interest. I've downloaded it and I'll be giving this a whirl for the next few days. Thank you so much! :)

Better to take action now and fix it up later.

MVP: You need a domain name, some hosting, 1 index.html at root for the main menu of links and 1 new file for each blog post. Make the title of each file the same as the title of your post like "Whats-a-good-static-site-generator.html" and dump the files in root as you go, link them from the main menu. You can write your posts and make the files using any text editor.

Worry about the stack later once you have a few posts under your belt and understand your mid-term use case.

But start now.

You're right about that. Also, it looks like I'm not necessarily locked to any particular system since most of them use the same underlying structure. I can easily move to something else when I need to.

I've got the domain, gonna end up hosting it on either Firebase, Netlify or GH Pages and I think I'm settling for Hugo since everyone here has spoken positively about it.

Thank you for your suggestions! :)

The best choices currently I think are:

-- Ghost (expensive but dead simple to apply themes) or

-- Hugo + Netflify (for hosting and automatically publishing your site when you push to your repo) + Forestry.io (for a nice front end to edit your posts if you want to avoid the command line)

I care about Markdown plus MathJax support (for math notation) and both these options support that.

Do you know who Ghost's intended target audience is? Their pricing at $29 (monthly) for hosting a simple blog seems bizarre when a DO droplet with pre-configured Wordpress is $5 (lots of other simpler WP hosting services out there).

Edit: ok, pricing page says „For professional bloggers“

Our customers are predominantly businesses and professional users who are quite happy to pay for a fully managed service and automation to save themselves time and energy. It's exactly the same as how you can self-host WordPress or Discourse for $5 on DigitalOcean, or you can find managed services at Discourse.org and WPEngine.com for $29-$99

If you're a developer and you want to just DIY - then you can. If you'd rather just pay someone else to manage the entire thing for you - then you can.

Ghost seems to be a bit expensive for my taste. Especially if you weigh it in my currency (INR). I'll consider it once I have my VPS set up but I'm leaning towards Hugo for now. Netlify is amazing :D

Thank you for Forestry though! Didn't know about it. Will definitely come in handy when I can't get to my personal laptop.

Previous discussion about almost exactly the same topic from 17 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16346187 (89 comments)

Sorry about that. Doesn't seem like Hn has an option to search, or does it? I don't really frequent the Ask HN section so I wasn't aware. Thank you for the link though. Found some interesting info there :)

Hugo seems quite popular these days, especially if you like Go https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo

Even if you don't like Go, Hugo is super-easy to install and get up and running.

Yep, already have it running locally and exploring what it's capable of!

I love Jekyll and GitHub pages for free hosting. Here’s a few clean templates I like:

https://bvallieres.com/resource/2015/07/29/jekyll.html

The templated do look slick! I'll see if I can find any counterparts for Hugo or rebuild any of them as I currently leaning towards that. Thank you very much!

Not sure if `blogdown` is known among wider audience. `blogdown` is an R package to generate static websites based on R Markdown and Hugo. So it couples the ease of using R markdown and speed/simplicity of HuGO. https://github.com/rstudio/blogdown But I'm not sure if a non-programmer would be interested in this just for blogging.

I've never used R myself. Will try to set it up and see how different this is from plain Hugo. Thank you!

Great! You can refer this one if you need any tech support https://bookdown.org/yihui/blogdown/

Thank you! :)

I was looking for one a while back and ended up making my own in PHP. I know it's not a popular language anymore but I have a PHP host where I put my websites and it's the quickest to get up and running for me. Anyway, it's on github https://github.com/sachleen/Steady and a website I made using it: https://github.com/sachleen/SacSciOly | http://sacramentoscienceolympiad.com

I tried all the others and none worked for me. Had to install all these new development environments, lots of issues setting up the local servers and building sites, etc. It's not perfect and I probably would not recommend it to anyone else (no docs yet, after all), but it works for me and doesn't take too much time to throw something together if you want simplicity.

I've done a tiny bit of PHP in my life and I was never good at it so I'm going to shy away from your suggestion. But, this will definitely put a smile on my friend's face. He just loves PHP. So, thank you for this!

I would argue, unless you specifically NEED the blog format for some reason, to use whatever you use for your project documentation.

i.e. if you program mostly with python then use Restructured Text and sphinx, etc.

Why? because then you can't say you are unfamiliar with the tools when it comes time to writing docs for your project, something we all suck at doing.

I am using nikola: https://getnikola.com/

The main reason is, that I really like jupyter notebooks and my blog began as experiments in Jupyter that I wanted to somehow preserve, i.e. http://notes.asaleh.net/posts/monoid-pattern-in-python/

Second reason is, that I like to experiment with format of my posts quite often (several were made in org-mode, i.e: http://notes.asaleh.net/posts/experimenting-with-purescripts...)

But it depends on what you want. I decided I want to write. So I focused on on writing and experimenting and try not to spend too much time on setup :-)

Good luck with your blog!

That's interesting! A good alternative to Pelican and Lektor. I'll consider this since I'm already comfortable with Jinja. Thank you very much :)

I hope 2018 here means cool and new solution that's different from previous ones in many ways - GatsbyJS

Yep! I'd love to give Gatsby a shot but I have no knowledge about React. Will try it out once I learn a thing or two about it. Nevertheless, thank you very much for your suggestion :)

This might be an unpopular opinion, but really wouldn’t sweat all the details just yet. I’d just start with something simple, free and widely used just so you get into the rhythm of blogging. An existing service probably, Wordpress would even suffice - I use Posthaven but it’s $5/month. You can focus on getting the perfect backend later, but I’d focus on writing the posts themselves and getting into the rhythm of writing to a schedule. Many well-intentioned blogs fall into disuse long before they outgrow their tech stack.

After you’ve put a dozen or so posts together you’ll have a better feel for what your needs are and you can then migrate your posts to the new platform of your choice - you can even write a blog post about it :-)

Posthaven is interesting! I'll have a look at it once I'm a bit more serious about blogging. Either this or something like Ghost.

You're right though. From what I can tell, most of these alternatives seem to be interoperable and I can jump around easily if need be. I'll start with hugo and see where that leads me. And I'll blog about that as well :) Great idea :D Thank you!

* Makefile * Pandoc * git

You push to a remote on your server, it runs the Makefile via post-receive hook and builds a single, static html file from your Markdown with Pandoc (inlineing everything, images even fonts if you want to) and copies it to the folder served by your nginx.

Hey! This really piqued my interest, could you explain more about the makefile part of this? I currently use Pandoc to convert a folder of .MD files into .HTML files with the same name, and have begun modifying the templates and making use of the YAML metadata you can add. I really like working with markdown like this, and it's perfect for Git.

Here's an example of the kind of build script I use currently: https://github.com/tomhodgins/responsive.style/blob/master/s...

How would you build the contents of the /src folder with pandoc and your makefile?

Edit: for those looking for an example of the result of one of my Markdown -> Pandoc -> Git -> Static Hosting workflows, check out this page:

- Static HTML: https://responsive.style/techniques/child-element

- Markdown Source: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tomhodgins/responsive.styl...

Here is a post I made (and generated) about my generator: http://flukus.github.io/building-a-blog-engine.html

It's pretty similar to your shell script but builds are incremental with no extra work. I went with awk for index generation and metadata. There's still plenty of room for improvement but it does most of what I want.

Interesting proposition. This could be a worthwhile weekend project. Will use Hugo for now as I don't intend to get my own VPS anytime soon but I'll definitely try this out. Thank you!

I built a JavaScript static site generator last year, works good for me. It uses github issues but makes it static.

https://github.com/geekodour/gitpushblog

Checking it out now! Seems to do quite a lot, actually. Great job!

Hugo is good, but you will need some technical expertise to customize it, unless you use a stock theme/template.

GitHub pages is also a great way to get started quickly - Markdown is easy to learn and there are several cheat sheets out there.

What I did in the end is created my own very simple site generator (calling it that is probably being over generous) - it lacks many features of a full-blown generator like Hugo, but it suits me down to the ground. I then host (for free) on GitHub and publish also to neocities.org (for free). See my HN profile for link to website - from there you can pick up the source code if you're interested.

Good luck with your blogging!

Hugo seems okay to me. Not that complicated so far. Yeah, it's a bit opinionated which kinda irks me sometimes coming from something like Jinja templating.

Do you have your SSG up somewhere on GitHub? I'd like to give it a look. Seems to be a cool idea. Thank you for telling me about neocities. Wasn't aware of that!

Check my HN profile. From there you can find my GitHub (see the repo Website-Test that has everything), feel free to use my code if you so wish!

Oh I really like neocities. You can sign up for pro membership and have custom domains and so on but I've not needed that so far - I may do at some point though.

All the best!

I'm very happy with using pelican for my blog:

https://startuplab.io/blog

It's very flexible, written in python, easy to customize, has plugins for any purpose. It supports markdown, latex, code snippets (with syntax highlighting). It's very simple to set up and you can use it for any purpose.

I've made a custom theme, configured it a bit, and served it with nginx on digital ocean(but you could also host it for free on github pages).

You can see the code and my custom theme here:

https://github.com/raymestalez/startuplab

----

Here's a few simple things I want to recommend, based on my experience:

- Immediately setup a mailchimp account and an RSS feed. Add a link in the header, and under each post (you can see how it works on my blog), you want to start build a list of followers right away.

- Ideally, write a short ebook or a guide to give people extra incentive to subscribe. The sooner you do this - the better. Here's a sexy landing page I've made for my blog to use as an example:

https://startuplab.io/free-guide

- Keep the design elegant and simple, nobody needs distracting sidebars or popups, avoid them unless absolutely necessary.

- Underneath my posts, I have 3 boxes recommending my other articles (or promoting my projects), it's a really neat way to keep people on your site.

- Don't forget to set up metadata and social images for good SEO and sharing. You can see how I did it in my template here:

https://github.com/raymestalez/startuplab/blob/master/themes...

- For a very simple commenting system I highly recommend isso:

https://posativ.org/isso/

It's really easy to setup and a pleasure to use. Although personally, I share my posts on HN/reddit, and have a link to the discussion thread automatically embedded in the post footer. That way you don't need any complex setup, and it's better for the exposure.

Thanks for the detailed reply, however I don't see any links to HN/Reddit in the footer or anywhere else on the mobile page of your blog posts?

Thank you so much! I'll keep these points in mind while settings things up. I almost forgot about commenting. isso will need a server component to do what it does and I'm planning on hosting it on something like github pages.

But then, I don't like Disqus myself. Can't imagine forcing someone else to use it. I'll think about it. Thanks for bringing this up and for everything as well!

Maybe you'd like to have a look at Talkyard's embedded comments: https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments — it doesn't require a server, if you use the hosted version. It's also open source like Isso, no ads or tracking. (I'm developing it.)

I'm using Hakyll, simply because I want a bit more exposure to Haskell. I've used Jekyll and Hugo in the past. Jekyll has lots of support but is slow for large sites. Hugo was alright. Only used it for a small project.

Here is a tutorial on creating a static site with Hakyll and Github:

https://begriffs.com/posts/2014-08-12-create-static-site-wit...

EDIT:

Tutorials about Hakyll: https://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/tutorials.html

Thank you! :)

Interesting! Will check it out. Thank you!

Git and GitHub Pages: Simple to set up and use, supports Markdown and code snippets.

Other than that I've never really understood the appeal of static site generators for normal websites or blogs that don't have millions of monthly page views.

Tools like Hugo for many common use cases (like ordinary websites with ordinary scalability requirements) often come across as a solution desperately looking for a problem while at the same time creating a few new problems: Compared with dynamic website software like WordPress they can be difficult to set up and they tend to be more difficult to use, especially for non-technical users.

Hugo is pretty good. I've started using it for some project websites[1,2], though I don't use it for blogging. For my own website/blog, I wrote it from scratch using Flask[3].

[1]: https://rootlesscontaine.rs/ [2]: https://umo.ci/ [3]: https://www.cyphar.com/

You're using the base16 theme for the first one, correct? Looks nice. I liked the second one as well. What theme is that?

Also, you've mentioned in the sidebar that you've built it using Grav and Hugo. Would you mind explaining how you've used both? And why perhaps? Just curious because someone here suggested Grav over Hugo and you seem to be using both.

I could make one with Django (overkill, I know) as I primarily work with it but I don't have a VPS set up yet and I don't think I'm going to attempt to get one anytime soon. The main reason why I wanted a static site is to not deal with configuring and maintaining the server. Thank you!

> You're using the base16 theme for the first one, correct?

Yup.

> I liked the second one as well. What theme is that? [...] Also, you've mentioned in the sidebar that you've built it using Grav and Hugo.

The theme is a Grav theme, ported to Hugo[1] (hence the "made with Grav and Hugo" -- the actual site is made with just Hugo). The source for the site is [2]. And the source for my other sites are here[3,4].

[1]: https://github.com/matcornic/hugo-theme-learn [2]: https://github.com/openSUSE/umoci/tree/b9e256550d732c14beeab... [3]: https://github.com/cyphar/rootlesscontaine.rs [4]: https://github.com/cyphar/cyphar.com

That's awesome, thank you very much! Checking those links out now. How difficult is it to port a Grav theme over to Hugo?

I have no idea (someone else did the port), but after looking at the two theme sources[1,2] I'm pretty sure it's non-trivial but not nearly as bad as writing a new one. They both have the same concepts (partials, templates) but the languages are quite different.

[1]: https://github.com/matcornic/hugo-theme-learn [2]: https://github.com/getgrav/grav-learn

Pelican (python) and Hugo were the ones I looked at before I decided to write my own toy SSG (python) for the heck of it. If you’re looking for something simple that you can build on, with support for Markdown, Jinja2 and static pages, take a look at https://github.com/amithmathew/pyjello If somebody wants to contribute, I’m happy to accept pull requests.

Any particular reasons why you chose to do this? I'm just curious on what the shortcomings of both these SSGs are that was off-putting to you.

I'll check it out. Seems to be mature enough to give it a try. Thank you!

In my experience, static site generators are not a complete solution. Unless you are satisfied with the default look and feel of generated pages (or a theme available), even Jekyll needs some tinkering, debugging and diving into the code.

So, in case you need customizaton: just stick with any static site generator written in a familiar language and don't be afraid to fiddle with generation process.

Yeah, I'll have to do that since I'm rarely happy with a default theme. Will need to modify it to suit my taste. Thank you!

I use Hugo too for https://apporchestra.com I have it in a GitLab repository with the continuous integration script configured to build and deploy it to Google app engine (configured as a static content so no paid instances are running) each time I push a commit.

Out of curiosity, may I ask why Google App Engine if the content is purely static. Surely there are better and simpler options like Github Pages. Wondering if there is a benefit to App Engine here that isn't quite obvious to me.

Yeah, I'm curious about the GAE aspect as well. Why have you chosen that over something like Netlify? Any particular shortcomings I'm missing?

I've personally been meaning to rebuild my personal site with Next.js: https://github.com/zeit/next.js/

Used it to build a few static sites at work and have quite enjoyed it as you get to use React.

I've never worked with React myself. I primarily work on Django right now and do very little frontend work. Although, I've been meaning to pick up React so I shall try this once I do. Thank you very much :)

I use (and like) Lektor. It's very flexible and easy to get started with. Hugo was another contender, but I found it very hard to understand and work with, and it took some hacks to do a very simple thing I wanted, so I abandoned it quickly.

I'll be giving both Lektor and Pelican a shot since they both use Python and Jinja and I'm familiar with them coming from Django. Thank you!

I used Github Pages which are Jekyll sites hosted by Github, which is sufficient for my needs and has a wealth of online documentation.

If it's for blogging, you can also take a look at Blogger, half the programming & security blogs I follow are on it.

Not a huge fan of Blogger. There have been quite a few instances that I've linked to below where Google has taken down blogs for no apparent reason. I don't want to give someone else control over my content.

https://www.vox.com/2016/7/30/12303070/dennis-cooper-blog-de...

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/feb/11/google-deletes...

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/artist-loses-14-yea...

Have a look at https://cuttlebelle.com

It was specifically built to help non technical people edit and compose pages. (which is not you :) )

Looks pretty slick! Unfortunately, I'm unfamiliar with React. Nevertheless, I'll definitely consider trying it out once I give React a shot. Thank you!

How I did mine with Github Pages and Pelican:

http://bytepawn.com/how-to-make-a-blog-like-this.html

You https certificate has expired? I can't access your blog for some reason. Also, it looks like it's blocked by the Government of India. I wonder why?

If you prefer Vue over React there is also https://nuxtjs.org/ which I found nice to work with.

This is pretty cool! I've just started picking up the basics of Vue. I'll give this a shot once I'm more familiar with it. Thank you! :)

I don’t know the right answer for you (probably depends on the language you know best or want to learn) but the “standard” is Jekyll in terms of maturity and acceptance.

Yeah, that's the thing. I primarily work on Django so Hugo or Pelican make sense to me. I did give Jekyll a whirl but I wasn't overly fond of it. I'll have to read through the docs and then decide if it's right for me. Thank you! :)

I quite like Metalsmith (http://www.metalsmith.io/

Looks good! I'll test it out today and see how it goes. Thank you!

- Hugo

- Travis CI

- Cloudflare

- GitHub Pages

This is how I host my website completely for free with SSL. Whenever I commit it to GitHub it will build and deploy it for me.

Interesting. I've always wanted to give CI a shot. This could be a good start to explore it.

What role does cloudflare play here? Just curious as I don't know what it's capable of doing.

I might end up adopting the same system as well since everyone here has been raving about Hugo. Thank you for the suggestions!

Cloudflare provides free SSL because the github pages are directing to a custom domain therefore there github cannot provide with SSL.

Ah! Right. That's on the todo list as well. Thank you very much!

What is all the recent trend for static site generators about ? What happened non-static sites ?

Security is a lot easier to reason about on a static site. Especially if you're leaving the server security up to, say Amazon and hosting off of S3 or a CDN.

Was security a huge problem in Wordpress ? I work in the tech industry too, but never came across security as an issue. Or is it about the plugins bringing in the unreliability ?

I haven't looked at Wordpress in years, but it used to have a terrible reputation when it came to security. Hopefully they've improved.

Plugins. The plugins are a never ending stream of XSS, SQLi, and other vulnerabilities. I used to intern on a web security team at Mozilla that hunted down these kinds of things and the entire experience revealed how easy it was to compromise your entire site because of a single plugin. During my six months there, I think I discovered 30+ plugins with issues. Most developers were responsive but some ignored us and the issues were never fixed.

Event without plugins, when your self host your wordpress you'd have to keep up with the updates.

Only having to send a bunch of static files makes it really easy.

I've personally never used Wordpress, but when I look at my server logs, there are always loads of requests from bots trying to attack Wordpress vulnerabilities in particular.

People realized that many pages don't need to be dynamic (especially since native comments on blogs are pretty much dead), and hosting a static site is easier/cheaper than taking care of a dynamic one. Why keep up with patching your CMS or pay someone to do that if it's not necessary?

It's hardly a "recent" trend now.

Gatsby is worth taking a look at.

Gatsby seems to be pretty slick but sadly, I'm unfamiliar with React. I primarily work on Django these days. I certainly will give Gatsby once I give React a shot. It's on the list of things I want to learn. Thank you very much!

If you like React, you should check out https://github.com/nozzle/react-static

Not familiar with React so I'm going to give this a pass (for now). Will pick it up once I'm familiar with it. Thank you!

To me, fretting frameworks is a form of writer's block.

Right? This has been a huge problem for anyone whos's considering starting anything these days. Variety is good, but sometimes I feel that we've just got too many choices and I find them to be exhausting sometimes. Or maybe it's just me? Not sure.

I'm settling with Hugo as it seems to make sense for me. Thank you!

Well, this thread got nuked didn't it? From first page to page 5 in under a few hours...

Right? I didn't expect it at all. It's my first (maybe?) post here and it just blew up. Love all the suggestions though. Quite a lot of them were immensely useful! :)

Hugo. And done!

ikiwiki

A little too simple for my taste but an interesting suggestion nonetheless. Will come in handy someday. Thank you!

Just use Getpublii https://getpublii.com

Its really different than other generators - it's a static CMS with GUI and themes. Comes with WP migrator, GitHub pages, Netlify, S3, Google cloud or sftp.

Looks great but sadly, they don't have Linux support (yet). Will check them once they start supporting Linux. Thank you :)

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