For those of you who host their own website, do you use a static site generator, or have you in the past, and if so what static site generators were your favorite to work with?
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I’ve used many in the past but ultimately migrated to https://www.getzola.org/. Once you’ve set it up it just gets out of your way.
I was just looking at Zola. It seems nice.
I’m a big fan of Astro. The sites it produces are really fast and they make it easy to integrate libraries like Vue, Svelte, or React. It overall has a nice developer experience as well.
Astro doesn’t look to be an SSG?
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It originally was just a static site generator, but it can do both now:
By default, Astro pages, routes, and API endpoints will be pre-rendered at build time as static pages. However, you can choose to render some or all of your routes on demand by a server when a route is requested.
I don’t use one. I write HTML and use server-side includes to jam together the navigation and the page. It helps me spend more time actually writing and less time reading the documentation of some configuration file.
Doing exactly this was why I learned PHP years ago
I use lektor for my own websites… it works fine enough. It’s not that big so it might not have great support. It also had some time where it kinda sat dormant, but it’s been getting some more attention.
I also help with jekyll for sphynx, it was fine, don’t have quite enough time with it so say much.
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werc anti framework and hugo are what I have used in the past
They can be simple in theory but also big time sinks if you are susceptible to that kind of thing. I feel like a gambling addict trying to set these things up sometimes. If you aren’t getting anywhere after a little while, cut your losses and bail
I have had best experiences with the ones that are “documentation”-oriented like mkdocs.
Make sure to consider the environment required to run the generator and avoid anything that will be excessively fragile or that require you to run a whole tool chain you wouldn’t otherwise have installed. And may be in conflict with your OS.
As with all open source, “customizable” is a euphemism for “you will need to read a lot of documentation and futz around in a bunch of configuration files in order to obtain even basic functionality”.
I just use Hugo. I’m sure there are other SSGs that are either objectively better or better for my specific use case (text-based blog) but it works fine for me.
I’m going to plug this in here to help people search for SSGs:
https://github.com/myles/awesome-static-generators
Some of the ones I noticed that were not listed include...
Zine, written in Zig:
https://github.com/kristoff-it/zine
Frog, written in Racket Scheme:
https://docs.racket-lang.org/frog/index.html
https://github.com/greghendershott/frog
Pollen, written in Racket Scheme:
Ooo more interesting things to check out. Thanks!
