7h ago

Which Static Blog Generator: blag, Jekyll, Hugo, Lektor, Pelican, staticsite?

I ran my own blog for many years but recently I suspect my server got hacked, and after reinstalling I want to do things a little differently.

I'd like to move away from PHP and I don't really need a dynamic CMS anyhow.

So far I've been using PicoCMS which serves content from markdown pages with a little header. I got quite good at it, wrote my own theme and a few plugins. The templating language is Twig so something similar would be a boon for me.

Writing content in markdown is my most important requirement, or rather reusing the existing pages with as little massaging as possible. Here is one example:

md

    
---
Title: Create WiFi Hotspot with NetworkManager
date: 24.11.2022
Tags: archlinux,android
template: post
---

# Make sure required depenencies are installed

blablablablablablablabla

I really want a tag cloud, which used to be my only sorting mechanism apart from date. Most generators, at first glance, offer a tags page. Honestly I have no idea if I'd have to template the cloud myself but tag functionality seems to be common, I guess?

What I don't want is any sort of web UI or even builtin server functionality or other bells and whistles for the user. I prefer to ssh into the server and do things on the CLI.

Now my most important constraint is that I want to use what's available in (or as a) Debian repositories. After a quick search around it boils down to:

blag
Jekyll
Hugo
Lektor
Pelican
staticsite

Searching for similar topics I found this and this. I read all the comments.

TIA

18 comments

I like Hugo, though it's been the only one I used. May get too involved, and some themes have features others may not have, for example, comment integration may not exist for some themes.

Astro may also be worth looking into if you'd like a SSG that is still capable of rendering some dynamic content

11ty is my favorite! cross-platform, good defaults, built-in tag support, and just generally good learning curve.

I went the same direction, from WordPress to static site generation. I did the same evaluation as you are trying to do and ended up with Hugo, mostly because there is a lot of support available for it. My runner up was Pelican, because I was fluent in Jinja2, but I didn't want to mess around with the templates and Hugo's were prettier. Sue me, I am shallow.
The one regret I have about Hugo is that the templating language is challenging. I am trying to be as neutral as possible, but it seemed like even simple things were complicated to achieve. If someone would come up with a Hugo that speaks Jinja2, I'd be really delighted.
Other than that, conversion from WordPress to Hugo was relatively straightforward, despite needing to find a gallery component and converting menus. Hugo is indeed very fast in processing, which become important when your blog has thousands of articles.
I set up the blog as a private git repository. The server pulls from it, then runs Hugo and a full text search engine, and the content is visible and searchable within five minutes on update.

There’s also Zola

I would also recommend Hugo, and believe it meets your requirements. The header markdown looks very similar to what you wrote, and it has tags. I'm not sure about a tag "cloud" the way you imagine it, but it's worth looking into.

Hugo. Most definitely. I use it for 5 different sites. The syntax is easy. Posts, pages, etc are in easy markdown. Compiles your site (directly to your web root if you like) in under a second. It's awesome.

Hugo.
https://gohugo.io/getting-started/quick-start/
- wrt to all I specified, why?
  
  "wrt"?
  
  https://blog.cubieserver.de/2020/adding-a-tag-cloud-to-my-hugo-blog/
  Fast, secure, bundled how you want and integrates easily with caddy and git runners.
  https://docs.gitlab.com/tutorials/hugo/
  Also is easily run in a container locally and deployed to a VPS or anywhere you like. Uses native markdown and is still actively developed.
  https://www.erraticbits.ca/post/2019/blog-hugo-gitlab/

Have you looked at Ghost?

This is a post near and dear to my heart. I too am looking for something markdown-centered, static, reasonable for code/technical content and that can embed not just photos but browser-side js graphs based on data within the markdown or REST calls. It's been a few years since I went down this rabbit hole and I got lost very quickly. Thank you for posting, I'll be revisiting over the next few days to see what the fediverse has to say!
- I use sphinx with Myst markdown for this, and usually plotly express to generate the js visuals. Jupyterbook looks pretty good as well
  
  That sounds pretty great - do you have a link to your site using this?

Also curious, have a similar project in mind. I've tinkered with jekyll a little and heard good things about Hugo. Hopefully people can speak to some of these.

18 comments