Submitted 8 months ago by fd93@programming.dev to programming@programming.dev
https://fd93.me/simple-sites-stack
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.
For this reason I’m building my own generator in Common Lisp, leveraging cl-who and parenscript. All components are descibed in one place and render as web components, which allows me to attach dynamic behaviors easily.
This works great for business-card style sites.
Another cool thing I realized - you avoid the chance of some framework updating under you and breaking everything. It’s a bit like pdf, it gets fixed and generally untouched.
What would be the advantages of these methods over something like Neocities?
For me, I write notes in Markdown anyways as part of a Zettelkasten, and by setting up my site this way I can stay in my development / note taking environment (nvim) and push stuff up to the site very quickly. It’s far easier as a developer to work off-the-cuff with this type of workflow, at least for me.
Also, would be very easy to self-host or move provider if Vercel or any other provider goes down.
I see, that makes sense
I must sound like an old fossil but I just use windows notepad to build any basic sites that don’t need like a shopping cart or anything complex.
A generator can help if you have a bunch of data that you need to convert to some html structure. I know what you are saying though, as little complexity as we can get away with, innit :)
BangersAndMash@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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 Their docs are out of date, the examples are out of date.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.
fd93@programming.dev 8 months ago
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.
aarmea@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Hugo was born out of Google so it has all of the same benefits and drawbacks as every Google project (both internal and external):
moonpiedumplings@programming.dev 8 months ago
I use 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:
quarto.org/docs/websites/website-search.html
Cons: No support for any kind of templating beyond simple variable replacement, as far as I know.
Iapar@feddit.de 8 months ago
I used Astro. It is a start but you can incorporate any us framework you want to.
shnizmuffin@lemmy.inbutts.lol 8 months ago
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.)
jadero@programming.dev 8 months ago
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.
rutrum@lm.paradisus.day 8 months ago
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.
knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml 8 months ago
That’s interesting, Hugo is the only SSG I’ve had luck with so far. I’m kind of stuck on Docusaurus at work and it’s a disaster.
On the face of things they’re all so simple, but aren’t documented well for users new to SSGs, and the build often spits out something unexpected with no way to figure out why.