Ask HN: What's a good framework for a simple, personal homepage? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's a good framework for a simple, personal homepage?

13 pointsdalek2point315 comments

I'm an academic looking for a simple HTML generating web framework to make my home site. Here are the requirements:

1. No databases, no javascript. Just static HTML + CSS. 2. Editing page content should be as simple as changing text in markdown, I dont want to be editing HTML. Static generators is probably what I want. 3. Should look nice -- lots of templating options. Im not a designer, so dont want to spend too much time working with CSS. 4. Multi-page, not a big fan of the "one page" multi-link layout. 5. Responsive -- should work well on mobiles and tables.

View on HN

I personally use and love Middleman http://middlemanapp.com It is more general purpose compared to Jekyll, which is more blog-focused.

It can be anything you want it to be. Responsiveness can be obtained by using a CSS framework. These things are independent of the static generator framework.

I second Middleman. I've used it for a number of static sites.

For responsive layout, I highly recommend Gridism. It's simple and lightweight.

You don't need a framework! Or Jekyll! Open your text editor and create an HTML page. You're solving a problem you don't have!

I've done this plenty of times. It pains me that I have to modify the footer on 5 different pages if something changes. I want to separate the content from the design, but I dont want to use databases. And I want to use ready-made templates that work well in different environments.

You can accomplish what you want with a good template from ThemeForest (or anywhere else) and some Server Side Includes or a dash of PHP if you are in a time crunch.

But if you want to edit in Markdown, a static site generator might be worth looking into.

I know Jekyll would be sold here in the name of "simplicity". But you should know that Jekyll sites are also the quickest sites getting abandoned because it takes a lot of work to do minor update to large site. Plus you may not find support for lot of customizations you might want to do. So I'd rather much prefer WordPress even though it's not being sold as "blog like hackers do". It's very usable, simple in use, installs in 5 minutes, extensible unlike anything else, tons of community support in form of plugins for everything you might ever want to do. You can self-host or get hosted by someone and so on. PHP jokes aside it's very likely the most usable, extensible and hackable system out there.

"it takes a lot of work to do minor update to large site" — could you elaborate? I'm not the OP but I've been considering switching to Jekyll for my blog, so I'd like to know the downsides.

Have you had a look at Github Pages[1] and Jekyll[2]?

[1] https://pages.github.com/

[2] http://jekyllrb.com/docs/quickstart/

Keep it simple check

My site+blog http://motyar.github.io/

code

https://github.com/motyar/motyar.github.com/

You'll certainly get a lot of different opinions when it comes to static sit generators. This site[1] may help you make up your mind.

[1] http://www.staticgen.com/

Like the other two posters, I recommend Jekyll. I really like the Poole (http://getpoole.com/) theme.

Get a Tumblr blog instead. This tool is underrated and much more flexible than people think. You can even host for free with your personal domain. Just SEO is far from perfect IMHO but probably that is not important for you.

tumblr + ifttt are a great combo. I can post on various services like twitter, delicious and Instagram and they're all aggregated on my tumblr feed.

Why not just use standard html with a css framework like pure?

Jeykll is a popular static site generator. You'll need a responsive template to use with it, of which there are plenty to choose from.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com