Ask HN: What's a good static site generator to use for a blog in 2018?

Hugo seems quite popular these days, especially if you like Go https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo

Gatsby is worth taking a look at.

Hugo is pretty good. I've started using it for some project websites[1,2], though I don't use it for blogging. For my own website/blog, I wrote it from scratch using Flask[3].

[1]: https://rootlesscontaine.rs/ [2]: https://umo.ci/ [3]: https://www.cyphar.com/

This is likely to be an unpopular answer, but the best choice is probably WordPress. I just used it to generate a network of about 40 static sites because (1) it has literally thousands of beautiful, professionally-developed themes for free; (2) same goes for plugins; (3) it's easy to hack if need be; and (4) it probably has one of the easiest-to-use and most-complete content editors, capable of creating both pages and blog entries, upload media, cropping images, etc.; (5) it has a variety of static site generation plugins to choose from; and (6) I spent hours looking at hugo, pelican, etc. and realized that any minor qualm I had with any of these common solutions was more or less addressed by the large and robust community of WordPress developers and enthusiasts.

It's not a sexy answer, but it's practical. Just make sure you don't leave the WordPress site you use to generate static content open to the public.

The best choices currently I think are:

-- Ghost (expensive but dead simple to apply themes) or

-- Hugo + Netflify (for hosting and automatically publishing your site when you push to your repo) + Forestry.io (for a nice front end to edit your posts if you want to avoid the command line)

I care about Markdown plus MathJax support (for math notation) and both these options support that.

Git and GitHub Pages: Simple to set up and use, supports Markdown and code snippets.

Other than that I've never really understood the appeal of static site generators for normal websites or blogs that don't have millions of monthly page views.

Tools like Hugo for many common use cases (like ordinary websites with ordinary scalability requirements) often come across as a solution desperately looking for a problem while at the same time creating a few new problems: Compared with dynamic website software like WordPress they can be difficult to set up and they tend to be more difficult to use, especially for non-technical users.

I hope 2018 here means cool and new solution that's different from previous ones in many ways - GatsbyJS

I used Github Pages which are Jekyll sites hosted by Github, which is sufficient for my needs and has a wealth of online documentation.

If it's for blogging, you can also take a look at Blogger, half the programming & security blogs I follow are on it.

Pelican (python) and Hugo were the ones I looked at before I decided to write my own toy SSG (python) for the heck of it. If you’re looking for something simple that you can build on, with support for Markdown, Jinja2 and static pages, take a look at https://github.com/amithmathew/pyjello If somebody wants to contribute, I’m happy to accept pull requests.

Sphinx.

What counts as "good enough" is such a subjective thing. What works for you will be some function of your needs and technical proficiency. It seems as though you don't have any specific needs, so any of the popular SSGs will be good enough for you. Pick one written in a language you already know, or pick one in a language you would like to learn. Some of the first Ruby code I wrote was a Jekyll plugin that I crudely hacked together. It worked fine. Jekyll is fast enough. Otherwise, there are plenty to choose from[0].

[0]: https://www.staticgen.com/

I built a JavaScript static site generator last year, works good for me. It uses github issues but makes it static.

https://github.com/geekodour/gitpushblog

How I did mine with Github Pages and Pelican:

http://bytepawn.com/how-to-make-a-blog-like-this.html

What is all the recent trend for static site generators about ? What happened non-static sites ?

I quite like Metalsmith (http://www.metalsmith.io/

Hugo is, IMHO, one of the best, most versatile options out there for an SSG. I've been using it since v0.15 (now at 0.37).

I use it for a simple, mostly text, blog (https://kar.ai).

I also use it for an image-heavy company site (https://www.stonelandinc.com).

I also use it for 20+ other sites for clients.

It's undergoing heavy development, so that may be a pro or con, depending.

e.g. Recently they added image processing [0]. This eliminates a python script I was using for the same purpose. It's much faster as well, which matters when regenerating ~1k images.

Down side, documentation & community is still catching up on the newer features.

0: https://gohugo.io/content-management/image-processing/

This might be an unpopular opinion, but really wouldn’t sweat all the details just yet. I’d just start with something simple, free and widely used just so you get into the rhythm of blogging. An existing service probably, Wordpress would even suffice - I use Posthaven but it’s $5/month. You can focus on getting the perfect backend later, but I’d focus on writing the posts themselves and getting into the rhythm of writing to a schedule. Many well-intentioned blogs fall into disuse long before they outgrow their tech stack.

After you’ve put a dozen or so posts together you’ll have a better feel for what your needs are and you can then migrate your posts to the new platform of your choice - you can even write a blog post about it :-)

I don’t know the right answer for you (probably depends on the language you know best or want to learn) but the “standard” is Jekyll in terms of maturity and acceptance.

I love Jekyll and GitHub pages for free hosting. Here’s a few clean templates I like:

https://bvallieres.com/resource/2015/07/29/jekyll.html

I use Hugo [0] as a static website generator. They have plenty of themes [1] to choose from. You can still adjust it with basic knowledge in HTML/CSS. Afterward you can chose where to host it. You can use Github Pages [2] for free or pay for a service like DigitalOcean (starting with 5€ a month which scales well) [3]. I wrote a technical cheatsheet [4] on how to setup your own website with these ingredients.

- [0] https://gohugo.io/

- [1] http://themes.gohugo.io/

- [2] https://pages.github.com/

- [3] https://www.digitalocean.com/

- [4] https://www.robinwieruch.de/own-website-in-five-days/

Not sure if `blogdown` is known among wider audience. `blogdown` is an R package to generate static websites based on R Markdown and Hugo. So it couples the ease of using R markdown and speed/simplicity of HuGO. https://github.com/rstudio/blogdown But I'm not sure if a non-programmer would be interested in this just for blogging.

I'm using Hakyll, simply because I want a bit more exposure to Haskell. I've used Jekyll and Hugo in the past. Jekyll has lots of support but is slow for large sites. Hugo was alright. Only used it for a small project.

I'm very happy with using pelican for my blog:

https://startuplab.io/blog

It's very flexible, written in python, easy to customize, has plugins for any purpose. It supports markdown, latex, code snippets (with syntax highlighting). It's very simple to set up and you can use it for any purpose.

I've made a custom theme, configured it a bit, and served it with nginx on digital ocean(but you could also host it for free on github pages).

You can see the code and my custom theme here:

https://github.com/raymestalez/startuplab

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Here's a few simple things I want to recommend, based on my experience:

- Immediately setup a mailchimp account and an RSS feed. Add a link in the header, and under each post (you can see how it works on my blog), you want to start build a list of followers right away.

- Ideally, write a short ebook or a guide to give people extra incentive to subscribe. The sooner you do this - the better. Here's a sexy landing page I've made for my blog to use as an example:

https://startuplab.io/free-guide

- Keep the design elegant and simple, nobody needs distracting sidebars or popups, avoid them unless absolutely necessary.

- Underneath my posts, I have 3 boxes recommending my other articles (or promoting my projects), it's a really neat way to keep people on your site.

- Don't forget to set up metadata and social images for good SEO and sharing. You can see how I did it in my template here:

https://github.com/raymestalez/startuplab/blob/master/themes...

- For a very simple commenting system I highly recommend isso:

https://posativ.org/isso/

It's really easy to setup and a pleasure to use. Although personally, I share my posts on HN/reddit, and have a link to the discussion thread automatically embedded in the post footer. That way you don't need any complex setup, and it's better for the exposure.

I've personally been meaning to rebuild my personal site with Next.js: https://github.com/zeit/next.js/

Used it to build a few static sites at work and have quite enjoyed it as you get to use React.