I’m looking for a tool to generate a simple personal website (like an online business card) to self host. Preferably a static site generator.

I’m now using Hugo, but it does too much for me and changes too often. (I can’t update my current page, because the template is no longer arond)

  • John Colagioia@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    9·
    7 days ago

    Personally, after churning through all the static site generator options, I landed on Jekyll, one of the first of them. It’s definitely not the sexiest solution, but it’s Markdown-in and HTML-out (my main page is still raw HTML/CSS from like twenty years ago, though), was the easiest for me to match the styling that I wanted from the base theme, and it’s been along for long enough that it’s mostly surprise-free.

    That said, if you only want the equivalent of a business card, I might argue that setting up anything is probably overkill, all overhead for just a tiny bit of content. In that case, you can grab some modern-ish HTML boilerplate like this one, then use Pandoc to convert the Markdown (which you presumably already know if you’re messing with Hugo) to the HTML that goes between <body> and </body> in the boilerplate. Add CSS, and you’re done.

    Oh, and actually, depending on how broadly you want just the “business card” idea, something like Littlelink might also fit your needs, where you hack out the links that you don’t care about and fill in destinations for the rest.

    • dogs0n@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      4·
      6 days ago

      +1 for just using html & css if it’s literally just an online business card (I’m sure theres millions of themes you can easily modify the source of and there won’t be updates to work around).

      A generator is only really useful if you have blog posts, multiple pages, something that changes often, etc, right?

      • John Colagioia@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        2·
        6 days ago

        That’s close to how I think about it, yeah, but I’d push more in terms of the investment. Since Jekyll, Hugo, Svelte, Eleventy, and the rest just generate flat HTML to upload, there’s nothing wrong with using it for a single page. But you end up needing to learn the whole build-and-deploy process and all the layout quirks, which (especially if you’re starting from scratch) will take longer to get the page out. And like you point out, the more material you have, the better that investment looks.

        But then, if you already know the system, there’s no new investment, so it becomes more of a toss-up whether to build things that way, since a page of Markdown is slightly faster to write than the equivalent HTML.

  • modeh@piefed.socialEnglish
    5·
    7 days ago

    My HTML/CSS skillset is abysmal, so I went with Hugo and deployed the repository onto cloudflare. It was up in minutes.

  • Xylight@feddit.onlineEnglish
    2·
    6 days ago

    It might be overkill, but my website xylight.dev is written in Svelte with the framework Sveltekit. I use the adapter-static and disabled the client JavaScript with export const csr = false in my +layout.ts.

    I really like Svelte since it lets me write reusable components really quickly, with very native feeling markup that, once I prerender it, expands into normal HTML.

  • SmokeyDope@lemmy.worldEnglish
    51·
    7 days ago

    I wrote my own set of tools in python that convert a simple gemtext formatted .gmi file into a static HTML file thats served by apache.

    I’m a big fan of the Gemini Protocol project and found that handwriting pages in gemtext was ideal for focusing on text content and not worrying about formatting. Converting it to HTML+CSS with some scripts is pretty easy.

    If anyone’s interested I can give a link, currently just hosting source locally on my website, really should get a public github running.

  • happydoors@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    7 days ago

    Have fun picking through the many options, haha. I just figured out Ghost (open source blogging platform) but it can easily be edited with static pages. It is basic but I am okay with the functionalities and ease of use

  • FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.auEnglish
    42·
    7 days ago

    People are going to hate this, but AI is perfect for this. You can literally just ask it to make whatever you want the website to look like in natural language and it will give you the code and generate a html page for you to preview.

  • Diplomjodler@lemmy.worldEnglish
    42·
    7 days ago

    If you know some Python, I’d look at Flask. It might be overkill for a static site but it’ll leave the door open for future expansion. If your goal is minimal effort, this is probably not the way to go.

  • confusedpuppy@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    21·
    7 days ago

    I found BashWrite which is just a very simple static site generator written completely in bash as a single file script.

    The only dependency is having an up-to-date sed command which most systems should have. I use Alpine Linux which comes with a minimal sed command so I had to download the full command through my package manager.

    It’s simple, basic and has support for the majority of markdown formatting. There’s some limitations due to it being written in Bash only but I am personally okay with that.

    I found it on this list of static site generators if you’re curious to see more options.