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Comment by Helmut10001 | Hacker News Reader

Mkdocs [1], Hugo, Jekyll or 11ty.dev are the way to go for blogs these days. All have RSS plugins.

Astro is my personal favorite: https://astro.build/

It's like an SSG where you can write templates with modern components frameworks, and write content in MD / MDX. No JS is shipped by default, but you can opt in to it for interactivity.

There are many high-quality templates, but making your own custom styling and layouts is easy, and you can write CSS in whatever way you like.

MkDocs and Jekyll are more for docs in my opinion, but Hugo is pretty good if you hate javascript.

I would recommend Astro over 11ty 100% of the time, though. Both are JS, with slower build times etc than with Hugo, but Astro integrates better with the rest of the ecosystem.

Gatsby has apparently fallen off a cliff, wouldn't even consider it.

I looked at themes for 11ty.dev and astro and find that most distract from the actual content and focus too much on "boilerplate design". The examples for astro are mostly the standard corporate-stuff-nice-slogans-but-no-content - if I see such websites, I usually close tabs immediately.

mkdocs, on the other hand, is made with a 100% focus on content, which is why I selected mkdocs for my blog. But different users will have different needs and there are many different blog types out there, so :thumbsup:

If you want the focus to be only content, you probably don't need a template. Templates often try to be flashy, but you can usually cut out the bloat. Some off-the-shelf offerings might have more desirable results out of the box, but I like Astro because I want to build the site myself.

Yes, I agree. There is still need for structure & organization, here mkdocs hat superior extended Markdown formatting Syntax (super fences, sane lists, code highlights etc.), all of that makes fast reading and filtering of content a lot easier. None of the other static site generators come close for this part of functionality.

Anyway, I completely understand your points, this is not meant to be ranting at astro!

We're also maintaining a Free Blogging project template for C# Devs preferring Razor Pages technology stack, which also includes support for RSS by default.

Like Hugo it lets you create statically-rendered, CDN hostable websites, but includes dedicated support for authoring and publishing blogs, here's what the primary blog view looks like:

https://razor-ssg.web-templates.io/blog

https://razor-ssg.web-templates.io/feed.xml (RSS Feed)

Other generated views for exploring blog archives:

- https://razor-ssg.web-templates.io/posts/ (explore blog archive)

- https://razor-ssg.web-templates.io/posts/author/lucy-bates (by author)

- https://razor-ssg.web-templates.io/posts/tagged/dev (by tag)

And for those wanting a privacy alternative to Disqus and Mailchimp, it can also integrate with CreatorKit [1] - a Free OSS .NET App you can self-host to enable Comments on Blog Posts including managing Newsletter mailing lists subscriptions which includes support for generating and sending Monthly Newsletters from new content added to your Razor SSG website - all features we're also using to power our blog features [2].

[1] https://servicestack.net/creatorkit/

[2] https://servicestack.net/blog

Pandoc is much better when blog, pdf, and epub are goals.

And literally almost any other lightweight markup option will be better suited too. Markdown doesn’t support metadata, details/summary, callouts/admonitions, image attributes, citing quotations, definition lists, etc.

Goldmark (Hugo) and many Markdown extensions do support description lists. Hugo also supports render hooks which make adding support for attributes, picture elements, etc trivial. And the vast majority of advanced markdown engines support a front matter, typically YAML although Hugo supports TOML and JSON as well.

So you have to pick your lock-in for a Markdown processor? Once you step outside of CommonMark, nothing is compatible. Compare that to AsciiDoc, reStructuredText, Org mode… these support metadata as a first-class feature (as you would expect from almost every other creative format: *.ogg, *.webm, *.odf, *.png, *.svg, *.html, etc.). Choosing such tools makes it a) harder to migrate to another tool & b) difficult/impossible for other tools to render it properly. You can skip that nonsense by just choosing a better format.

It's a very common Markdown extension supported by PHP-Markdown-Extra, Goldmark, Pandoc, Kramdown, and dozens of others. Several of these have supported it for almost ten years now, with the same syntax.

PHP-Markdown-Extra is the closest thing to a standard with more than GitHub-Flavored-Markdown; several other Markdown engines use its featureset as a baseline for compatibility for anything not present in GFM, even blocking the shipping of new features until after PME agrees on a syntax. So you can think of CommonMark as the lowest common denominator, GFM for an intermediate version, and PHP-Markdown-Extra as something suitable for building more advanced websites.

Gotta add 11ty to that list as well:

11ty.dev

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