Ask HN: What is the best static site generator for an inexeperienced sysadmin? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the best static site generator for an inexeperienced sysadmin?

6 pointsgreggarious10 comments

I previously tried (and struggled) to stand up a Jeckyl site for a domain I bought.

I've had bad experiences with Wordpress, and don't want to continuously be patching, a static site will have less attack surface and it'll be a learning opportunity.

I want to use a static site to ensure folk browsing over Tor with the safety slider at the highest setting can read... as well as for economic reasons: less $ to pay for the hosting if I get Slashdotted - blog which is purely plain text will not generate as high of server bills. Also, I just plain like the simpler designs of the late 90s and early 2000s. Finally, I'm an environmentalist... I don't think it's ethical to use a bunch of unnecessary web two point oh BS when a clean design similar to HN will work just fine and require less resources.

On my end, I initially trained as a UX researcher -- my bachelor's is in Information Science, with "related areas" in Psychology and English literature due to some local politics I'll skip over in favor of focusing on the technicals, but at my heart I'm a phone phreak turned hacker who was raised by the internet during that liminal period in the 2000s where everyone and their brother had a VBulletin they hung out on. (Gonna respect people's privacy and not name the one I learned on)

I still regret not doing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction instead of wasting my 20s on civil society, and it's reflected in my posting style -- sorry for being so... loquacious.

Based on the above context, what do people suggest for someone looking to make a static site to publish the tools and techniques developed over their hacker journey?

Thanks in advance for suggestions on tools, technologies, and hosting providers. (Currently leaning towards Digital Ocean on the last one, but open to suggestions!)

Hugo is nice. I only tested it briefly, the learning curve will be bigger than Wordpress. It generates static HTML in a uniquely "live" kind of way. You could then probably figure out a way to push it to a free service like Heroku, if you don't want to manage a server (incl. web server configs, patches, etc.).

I'll look into it, thanks for the suggestion. I don't know anything about Go, part of why I was looking into Jekyll is since I know a little bit of Ruby at least.

>a free service like Heroku

I mean, if the pages are static I can probably handle subscribing to a list for say, Apache, I just want to keep things simple since apparently Wordpress with all the JS etc has quite a big attack surface.

Anyways, I'll grab a book on it and see if it looks promising, but part of this is speed -- I'd hoped to stand something up by 1/1/23 but I may have to push that to Valentine's apparently...

I write posts in markdown and transform them to html with pandoc.

Thanks for this, I may take a more manual approach. Do you have a preferred webserver?

Nginx, but I can't speak to its suitability for your use case.

Is nginx pretty stable? Part of why I disliked Wordpress was the constant security issues. If I could patch / upgrade rarely (or automate that) paired with using static content so there’s no dependencies it could be a good solution.

I think they release a minor version once per quarter. Not sure how vital or hard it is to update everything, but it's way more secure than WordPress.

Another option is to take advantage of a service to host your static files for you. For example, netlify can be pointed at a git repo with static files, or you can drag and drop a folder of files to deploy / update your site. Because your files aren't really tied to the hosting platform, if you decide to switch solutions it's really as simple as changing your dns records.

gastby is nice if youre already familiar with doing frontend using React.

mkdocs is nice if you want something dumb as nails: just give it the markdown files, and itll build the static assets. i think it has hot reload somewhere too.

https://www.mkdocs.org/

I'll look into both, but "parse markdown, generate static" sounds promising -- thank you

(Basically looking for a blog + a few static pages like about, blogroll, etc)

You might like something I built if you want something really, really simple: https://src.xza.fr/python/blog_generator_py/

But note I didn't doc it as I just made it for personal use. But the way you run it is ./py/generate_blog.py, and you need to have Perl implementation of "markdown" installed (usually apt-get install markdown)

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