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Comment by aborsy | Hacker News Reader

What are good static site generators (SSGs) to create a simple minimalist academic-like website?

It seems Astro or Hugo (potentially with Tailwind to customize CSS) are good options. Astro felt more complex than needed, on the other hand, writing html/css manually doesn’t work well either (predefined layouts and easy to use style customization options would be needed). I couldn’t find a suitable Astro theme either (most themes seem to be made for companies, or needlessly fancy, and a few for individual blogs).

In the process of figuring this out, I was surprised how complicated designing a website has become. There are so many frameworks, components, integrations and significant dependancies that I wondered how web developers keep up in this ecosystem.

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Quarto (https://quarto.org/) is well regarded in academic publishing and supports website projects: https://quarto.org/docs/websites/.

Thanks for mentioning it, it has relevant templates, including an interesting one for a class.

Ask LLM to write a 50 LOC program to convert directory of markdown files to directory of html files using pandoc.

This actually might be the "correct" solution these days. Pre-LLMs I wrote myself a python script to that converts markdown to html with custom headers and footers and rest of the junk, but today I would for sure give LLM a go first and see if what it produces.

Having done a fair amount of LLM webpage generation, it does an okay job, but repeats a lot of "best practices" that are a few years out of date. Specifically around meta tags.

If I were doing this, I would have it do Deep Research or similar on the most minimal, efficient set of tags to include in the `head` tag in late 2025.

It's possible you can get away with a bunch of .md files, but you will need a file to store site-wide metadata and/or YAML "front matter" in the MD to define page-specific variables.

I wasn’t really thinking that LLM would output HTML but rather would make a script that does

> I was surprised how complicated designing a website has become.

Sounds like you would enjoy https://mastrojs.github.io – a _minimal_ Astro alternative.

It is a natural entropy of web system.

We could not hope that everything would remain simple. Thanks for all the open standards and frameworks that we don't have to license.

And yes, it is a paralysis of choice.

I use github pages with jekyll. It took a bit of time to make a custom theme and setup the custom domain, but its really simple now to just add markdown file and push to github.

https://github.com/loldot/loldot.github.io

If you really believe things were easier in the past, then just do what you did back then. It'll all still work.

Maybe look into Eleventy [0] or Zola [1]. Both are relatively recent developments and have a skilled and forward thinking userbase.

[0] https://11ty.dev/

[1] https://getzola.org/

You can find CSS only themes or Tailwind themes to use with Astro or Hugo.

I personally liked Astro's approach to "Components", less glue more "just writing html/md". That is of course a learning curve on its own.

Not that you need more choices, but franklin.jl hit my sweet spot for “handles math and code inline well, otherwise is clean and gets out of my way”

No need for a SSG. Just copy something like this: https://thebestmotherfucking.website and make every page by hand like you are some 80 year old greybeard.

Yeah, I got fed up with all the dependencies and processes and workflows and configurations and just manually made my site like it's 2004, just hand-written HTML+CSS+JS. As long as it's a small personal site, this is very robust and there is no constant churn and deprecations and change for the sake of change.

I have a couple of 100% handwritten sites as well. The challenge is when they go beyond about a dozen pages. If you want to change something across pages that isn't a find & replace, like adding a meta tag, it starts to be a drag. I'm going to be converting one of those sites to Swift Publish soon, as it's a low-dependency framework that hasn't been updated in years.

Sure, but many people just want to have a super basic academic site with like 1 or 2 pages ("simple minimalist academic-like website" as it was phrased upthread), and then start to fiddle with a million frameworks and the compilation chain is broken in a few months when you want to add your new publication to the site, and you have to dig through versions and dependencies and environments and CI/CD and whatnot. When you could just type up your site in one afternoon by hand and it will keep working indefinitely.

I experimented with customizing a flat page by writing HTML and CSS manually, with some help from LLMs. Using this approach, it’s possible to create something resembling the website you linked.

The result is decent, though the organization of the long page could be improved. In my view, a good personal website would include space for a photo, name, and affiliation, along with a simple menu for sections like biography, publication, projects, with a professional style (font and colors), but no more complex. The publication page could have a style for presenting papers in a clean well-formatted list. That may require a theme that comes with a layout and a degree of customization and novelty.

A lot of themes I looked into are not quite professional.

For what most people are doing with static site generators (blogging) going "raw" HTML is honestly not a bad choice. Most usage of Markdown is just to avoid writing tags. It's not a whole lot more work to write `<em>foo</em>` instead of `_foo_`.

HTML was meant to be hand-authored, not a compilation target. It's like if people forgot you can still cook rice without a rice cooker.

if you've been ai-pilled, just have Claude generate it for you from the .MD files you wrote by hand

This line of conversation is distracting people from the embarrassing state of the WWW.

If anything good is left outside the temples of Facebook, etc, it's not much, and I'm embarrassed.

There are many threads here on HN about that as well. But this thread here is about CSS styling.

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