Stacks for Simple Static Sites
Stacks for Simple Static Sites
Wouldn't it be great if you could type out an article on your computer, push a couple of buttons, and have it appear on the web? No clunky page builders, no admin logins, and no mandatory updates. With the right setup for your website, this is possible. I wrote about …
Hey, just wanted to drop this here. It's a technical follow-up to The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Static Sites which was reasonably popular, and explains the components of a static site's stack.
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Just last week I decided to try a different tech than I'm used to to run up a site. I did a little research then searched GitHub and found Hugo. I read the Hugo docs, followed their beginners guide and... Didn't get fucking anywhere. Their docs are out of date, the examples are out of date. It looked so promising but my brain works best when referencing examples and when I couldn't even get those to work, well, I don't have time for that these days.
If anyone knows another static site generator with up to date documentation and an easy to run up example please let me know.
I use Pelican for the site and it's working great. :)
Astro is also popular and will be familiar if you've developed with React before as they support JSX templates.
Hugo was born out of Google so it has all of the same benefits and drawbacks as every Google project (both internal and external):
- Lots of capabilities. You name it, it's a feature.
- To support all of those capabilites, there's abstractions for everything -- enough to make you go a little insane if you have to go through the code.
- Lacking documentation. Nobody gets promoted for writing docs, so if you really need to know how that feature works, you have to go through the code.
- May be abandoned at any time (but pull requests/CLs are always welcome).
I use https://quarto.org
Pros: Markdown, easy to use. Docs are very good. Also, despite being a a static site, it comes with fulltext site searching, all done locally, enabled by default:
https://quarto.org/docs/websites/website-search.html
It uses pandoc under the hood, so anything that works with pandoc works there.
Cons: No support for any kind of template engine beyond simple variable replacement, as far as I know.
11ty is great, especially since it's very BYO in terms of templating languages. (I started with nunjucks until I figured out the magic that is webc.)
I tried a few. Zola was the only one I got far enough with to actually get my site deployed.
Some of that might be that I learned stuff from my previous failures, but I really feel like the combination of the way it works and the Zola-specific themes are what worked for me.
I used Astro. It is a start but you can incorporate any us framework you want to.
The Docs are great which is why I used it.
Hexo has been working great for me. I found the documentation great as well.
I use zola for my sites. It's got not as many templates as hugo but my sites don't use templates and I found it very straightforward to use from scratch.