this post was submitted on 21 May 2025
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~~wrt~~ With regard to all I specified, why?
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.
I'm skeptical because it seems tied to the github universe.
And here's what other people commented about Hugo:
- "It gets admittedly more complex if you’re wanting to write your own theme though."
- "But as soon as you do want to customize it, you’re stuck learning one of the most esoteric languages that wasn’t meant as a joke."
- "The documentation is unclear and there’s a chicken and egg problem about how to learn Hugo."
What do you think?
"wrt"?
"with regard to"
I thought that might be what they were saying, but then it would be "with regard to to" so I was unsure.
Initialisms like this bug me because they cause confusion for the most minimal amount of benefit.
I was hoping to find an answer the original question in this dialog.
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.
11ty is my favorite! cross-platform, good defaults, built-in tag support, and just generally good learning curve.
Eleventy is my goto as well. It builds a really, really static site. Perfect for posting practice writing, photos, and notes from the steps I take doing my homelab.
Not sure if this will work for you but I keep my homelab documentation in markdown, mainly edited with Obsidian. I wanted an easy way to access via web and found Perlite. I have this pointed at a notes folder on my server which is auto-updated with Syncthing. No fuss, just works
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!
You may want quarto. It is explicitly designed for data science and related usecases, and has ample support for the graphs those usecases need.
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?
Unfortunately not, here is a little kitchen sink type demo though https://myst-nb.readthedocs.io/en/latest/authoring/jupyter-notebooks.html
Myst-nb is probably the place to start looking btw - forgot to mention it in previous post
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.
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.
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.
I think you're the first one mentioning Pelican. Apart from the theming, would you recommend it? I'm familiar with Twig.
needing to find a gallery component
Oh yes, that would also be relatively important to me. Again, does Pelican offer that?
There must have been a gallery component, since I only looked at generators that had one available.
Honestly, in hindsight the templates were really not a big deal. Just for fun, I tried converting the Hugo template I used to Pelican, and it was easy for me.
Pelican is solid and mature and I would use it, in hindsight. The only major flaws are that it's much slower (but makes up for it with incremental builds) and that the community is much, much smaller. On the plus side, Jinja2 is much, much, much better than Go templating (Hugo borrows from Go).
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.
Isn't it overkill? I'm also skeptical because it seems tied to the github universe.
And here's what other people commented about Hugo:
- "It gets admittedly more complex if you’re wanting to write your own theme though."
- "But as soon as you do want to customize it, you’re stuck learning one of the most esoteric languages that wasn’t meant as a joke."
- "The documentation is unclear and there’s a chicken and egg problem about how to learn Hugo."
Admittedly I've only used it with a preconfigured theme and no need for real customization. If you do need those features, I'd imagine the other commenters are correct.
I use quarto: https://quarto.org/
The big thing I like is that it has fulltext local search, built in and easy to enable.
Search is possible on hugo, but it's not built in, you have to get a plugin, etc etc. Same for many other options you mentioned.
Heres my website: https://moonpiedumplings.github.io/
The search is nice, certainly a good thing to have in a blog. It has interesting features, most of which I'll probably never use. No theming afaics but I'm sure that can be remedied. Your end result certainly looks nice enough.
Why would I otherwise sway from my hard requirements to use this? It is not in Debian's repositories. However, a simulated install suggests that it has all dependencies bundled. What's it really based on? Python I guess?
Quarto has theming via several built in bootstrap themes.
Quarto is written in javascript.
Also, it has no template engine/templating. I have a nasty hack where I write python code blocks (vua quarto's ability to execute code blocks) to output markdown that can be remdered to both html and pdf, which is pretty unique. But this is probably not what most people making a website want.
There’s also Zola
Why would I choose that over my requirements? C'mon, just throwing names isn't enough.
What templating language does it use?
Have you looked at Ghost?
Why would I choose that over my requirements? It's not in Debian repos.
@A_norny_mousse@feddit.org Personally, I use Zola. It is written in Rust and my understanding is simpler/more minimalist than Hugo. They are not in the official repo, but they do have a .deb package on Github https://github.com/barnumbirr/zola-debian (main page: https://github.com/getzola/zola) and they have a forum in case you have questions.
Thank you! instead of the deb package or building it myself, I just downloaded the lastest from their github. It is one executable, and seems to be working fine so far. Not saying it's my choice, but it's easy enough for a quick test and the templating language looks very familiar.
I use Zola too. I chose it because it is like a simpler version of Hugo and it has a much easier templating engine (it's similar to Jinja2).
I use hugo a lot, I also made my own static site generator called Rubedo which is very similar in concept to hugo and other similar SSGs, but with much more of a "batteries not included" approach. The idea is that existing SSGs are nice but if you're trying to build something that is not a blog or blog-like thing it starts getting cumbersome, and that's where rubedo comes in.
I think most people here (me included) suggest hugo because it's simple very well supported, although not without its issues: the templating is a bit obtuse and again if you're trying to diverge from the "blog" archetype you're gonna need to do some trickery in my experience (I made a quite complex theme for hugo so I would know).
If you're feeling like messing around with a different approach and doing more work you can try out rubedo, maybe even open an issue or two along the way. Another thing that you might like about it is that rubedo uses Tera for templating, which is heavily inspired if not mostly identical to jinja2.
Isn't that the same Zola uses?
Please riddle me this: why are there at least three templating languages - Jinja2, Twig, Tera - that appear to be identical, yet distinct?
They're template engines, not languages. They use a language and different engines may have similar if not identical languages.
There are multiple engines because each engine is usually made for a specific programming language: jinja2 for python, tera for rust and idk about twig.
Docusaurus. It supports markdown, and you can also use JavaScript if you like.
Astro may also be worth looking into if you'd like a SSG that is still capable of rendering some dynamic content
Interesting. Big Names.
It's based on some js framework, right? Probably pulls in Gigabytes of dependencies.
Why would I choose that over my requirements? It's not in Debian repos.
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.
That's usually fixable with templating. What sort of comment integration? Some third party I guess?
Self host and third party exists. You probably could use Lemmy as a shoddy way to make comments too
Self host
On a static site generator? Can you link me to that please?
What about Hugo's templating language? It's been said to be daunting:
- "It gets admittedly more complex if you’re wanting to write your own theme though."
- "But as soon as you do want to customize it, you’re stuck learning one of the most esoteric languages that wasn’t meant as a joke."
- "The documentation is unclear and there’s a chicken and egg problem about how to learn Hugo."
Alright, this is gonna be long.
Firstly, yes, different static site generators have different templating langauges. But just like normal programming languages, it is easy to transition from one templating langauge to another. If you take a look at the syntax:
- Pelian: https://pypi.org/project/Jinja2/
- Hugo: https://pkg.go.dev/text/template, https://pkg.go.dev/html/template
Not drastically different, but reading the docs, they are all similar enough, and easy to learn.
I wouldn't call go's templating language "esoteric", but it should be noted that jinja2 is has other uses, most notably it is the templating engine that Ansible uses.
As for the docs... This could probably be a blog post by itself.
Firstly, take a look at this website: https://killedbygoogle.com/ . Google has created and then killed 296 projects, many of which were actively used and working. Why?
This is because, internally at Google, you get promoted if you either A: write software, or B: add more features to software. So what happens is people write software, get promoted, and then realize they don't get paid more if they actually maintain that software, so they just kill it. Also, they forget to write documentation (because it doesn't pay more or get you promoted).
Hugo, is by a Google Engineer, and it shows (or at least, it used to). Software by Google has two distinct characteristics (actually 3 if we count being written in Go).
- It has every feature you could ever want, even stuff you haven't heard of
- And it's poorly documented. Or not at all lmao.
But, "being poorly documented" is not a permanent fixture of this software, but instead something that mostly persists for as long as it's Google software. Often, these projects get "adopted" by the wider community, who fixes up their documentation. Looking at hugo's docs, it doesn't seem be nightmarishly bad, especially for the core, main set of features. Like the setup docs appear to be clear (although a more complex process than alternatives).
But like, for search options: https://gohugo.io/tools/search/ . That google software pattern continues. There are like 10 options on the page, and no docs from hugo on their usage/installation lol.
Anyway, I would recommend eithier Pelican or Jekyll, given your requirements. Because everything you write is in markdown, it will be fairly easy to move from one static site generator to another, even if you are dissatisfied.
Also, kinda sorta relevant:
(source)
But the point I'm trying to make is the same. Don't agonize over selecting the perfect static site generator.
Thanks for the breakdown, this is really helpful.
It kind of confirms my unclear suspicions concerning Hugo.
Looking at its templating language, it looks daunting.
Looking at Jinja, it looks identical to Twig. There's at least one other templating language that is almost identical. I wonder why that is, or where the actual differences lie (not the underlying mechanics, but the spec).
What I thought was my biggest requirement actually isn't: I tried Zola yesterday, it is not in Debian's repos, but it's a single executable, unzipped straight from their github and Just Works. Everything becomes easier when you don't have to worry about software that connects to the world (assuming the generated HTML is 100% safe of course).
But I'm also trying Pelican. I don't care if it's slow.
I was fighting with my linter tbh still have no clue how to write html in go like its php
And, for the comments part, I haven't looked into it, it's likely just a JavaScript file that connects to your server or an external one and pulls all data and whatever, its the single dynamic part and it's done with js
If you're into GNU/Guile Scheme, there is also Haunt: https://dthompson.us/projects/haunt.html
GNU/Guile Scheme
What is that?
Why would I choose Haunt over my requirements? It's not in Debian repos.
It's the language of GNU. And a scheme. That's also why you would choose Haunt. It's probably not for you.