OK, then my methods are probably of no use or interest to you. Which is fine; I just wanted to check first.
1 Like
I can get a sense of your approach, and I bet it really cuts down on dependencies since you’re using a lot of tools that are already on a Unix system. Personally I just don’t like the interface, plus it might not be enough for my specific needs anyway.
That’s perfectly valid. I do it because every existing content management system and static site generator comes with implied opinions about how to build a website and what a website should look like, and I’ve come to the conclusion that if I want it done my way I’ve got to do it myself.
This isn’t Burger King, after all.
And since I already have some familiarity with Unix, I figured I’d lean into that and see how far I could get with basic tools. And not having to deal with Node.js and the NPM ecosystem is a huge plus for me. I get enough of that nonsense at my day job.
2 Likes
I’ve quickly come to this realization too. I’m going to try writing a CMS again, but make it more hardcoded to my precise needs, rather than try to make it useful for everyone (which was the main reason why my earlier design was a disaster).
I bet. I’ve been using Elixir for writing server-side stuff lately. By far my best experience with writing anything server-side. Even though I wrote my (disastrous) earlier CMS in it, the reasons it was terrible was entirely on the way that I built it, and even after not touching the codebase for a while, coming back to it and adding a feature to download a static archive was really easy.
In general the Elixir ecosystem seems to have found the right balance of making developers productive while not requiring hundreds of dependencies.
1 Like
I love Elixir, but it would be a bad fit for an SSG. For a CMS, it could be great. BeaconCMS is pretty interesting. I don’t like running infrastructure for a personal site, though these days that’s a lot less fraught than a a decade ago, so that’s why I’m quite happy with Hugo.
1 Like
Oh I agree, in general it’s not a great fit for any substantial file I/O or text processing.
I’m considering experimenting with some features that wouldn’t work with an SSG at all, like comments, a guestbook, stuff like that. And I certainly don’t want to use external services for that just so I can keep my website static.
Yeah, some other crazy setup, absolutely.
Next up on my list is adding functionality for watching and parsing CSV “log files” to generate my reading log and, eventually, a workout log. To replace Goodreads and Strava.
I’ve also been thinking about making an “app” with an actual GUI that handles images, file creation, and storing them in the right place for triggering publish etc. Which I guess is bordering on “CMS” functionality.
1 Like
Another one! 
I adore 11ty, it was just what I needed after thinking: “I enjoy editing HTML files, but there’s no way in hell I’ll be copy-pasting every new article page again and again…”.
I have been using Next.js for commercial products, but I wouldn’t recommend that bloated mess. At this point in time there seem to be many popular, lighter, and at the same time better, options available.
4 Likes
For my personal website, I use Lume; my previous site used Nanoc.
The site for my conlang uses Pollen because I have a few qualms about Markdown. I would recommend against it now because
- it doesn’t do proper dependency tracking
- it outputs its files in-tree alongside the sources
- Racket is pretty rarely used and extremely verbose
though part of my troubles with maintaining this site is from wanting to have a PDF version of my grammar (a lot of processing code has to adjust between HTML and LaTeX output, and LaTeX is its own kind of slow…). Perhaps it might work better for your site.
I’m looking forward to Typst’s HTML export becoming more mature.
1 Like
I have a site that uses Drupal, a site that uses 11ty, and a few sites using Hugo. In addition, my main site is in PHP instead of vanilla HTML, because it’s more convenient to update one sidebar.php file for my navigation than every single page’s sidebar portion.
1 Like
An update here: since the initial discussion, I’ve switched to using Hugo for melvian.net. While I’m not a fan of the learning curve and somewhat tedious nature of SSGs, Hugo is a lot more enjoyable to work with than Jekyll and trying to create a stable CMS takes significantly more effort than I can afford right now. The important part is that I now have a copy of the site I can actually edit, that I can set aside and work on other things.
Someday I’ll make a CMS, but it’ll be a long while.
1 Like
I always feel like an old man reading about all this software people use to edit their websites - Jekyll, Hugo, Typst, Drupal, Eleventy, Lume, Nanoc, Pollen… I don’t think I’ll ever know what they all do exactly. Anyone else just use a text editor and PHP or equivalent? Just me? Alright I’ll see my way out
I use a variety of solutions, depending of the website. Handcrafted HTML as a bedrock foundation. A couple of SSGs I made for special purposes. Feather Wiki in a few places. PmWiki too, where having a CMS makes sense. My philosophy in recent years has been to not let any one app control my websites. Definitely never the homepage! That way if any of them is cracked, stops working or becomes abandoned, that section can be replaced without excessive effort, while everything else remains in place. A trick I’ve learned from bitter experience, and proved useful again a few short years later. Being prepared for a change made a big difference.
1 Like
Emacs, shell scripts, and a makefile here. Some sed, awk, and m4, too.
1 Like
Haha, me too! Just Sublime Text and HTML/PHP for me, along with CSS and Javascript. I do think it’s awesome that there are so many different tools to choose from these days, because everyone has different needs, but I’m also glad that the plain old tools work for folks like me.
1 Like
I totally get it, I feel that way about a lot of software. There’s so many choices out there and it overwhelms me. Which is one of the reasons I picked Hugo, as it’s one of the more popular choices and I really didn’t want to spend a lot of time trying to find a solution that could be better but would take me forever to find.
Heck I don’t even bother searching for themes or any plugins, I do all my templates from scratch.
1 Like
I use Hugo a lot, but I’d sometimes prefer a GUI for editing posts. I like the Publii idea. There’s something like it for Hugo sites, it’s called Quiqr. I’m kind of surprised it hasn’t received more attention.
I do both, so I get to have all the fun!