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)
Write markdown and convert to HTML with pandoc?
Ghost Blog. Open source, flexible, loads of potential uses, works every time.
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 withexport 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.
For a simple links-only page I’m using Linkstack, and there’s also littlelink
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.
+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?
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.
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.
Create a custom hugo template that you can maintain yourself however and whenever.
Screech all you want, Copilot. It’ll take 10 minutes to get an MVP and you can just tweak from there.
I suggest one of the many wonderful one-page templates available on GitHub, Codeberg, et. al. GitHub has a whole topic on them at https://github.com/topics/single-page-site. You pick one that matches your requirements and that looks good to you, change the text, and serve.
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.
I know its old and unmaintained, but I really like picoCMS. its just a markdown to HTML site thing, but I cant find any replacement
According to their GitHub https://getgrav.org/ is an “excellent alternative”.
yes, but no.
All the alternatives I have looked at had a re-setup tax that I didnt want to get into, also none of them had the easy editing that pico has. you just point it at a collection of markdown files and you get a site out.
My HTML/CSS skillset is abysmal, so I went with Hugo and deployed the repository onto cloudflare. It was up in minutes.
I was in a similar boat. Wanted a simple static site generator with little to no config. I found https://github.com/rochacbruno/marmite and am happy with it
I like to use bootstrap studio for website design.
Another tool, not sure it will fit your needs exactly, called reactive resume. Might be able to use it as a business card.