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

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

#31

Post by detaro »

TickleSteve wrote: post #28
maxk42 wrote: post #5

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 a…

its not static tho, which invalidates it from this list. The fact that you mention it has a content-editor indicates you're not using it in a static fashion. (Correction, I hadn't realised you could use it in a static way... I last touched WordPress back in the dark ages!)

The output is static HTML files uploaded to S3, that makes it a static site generator in such a setup. That it has a dynamic component for the editing process only doesn't change that.

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

#32

Post by rwieruch »

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/

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

#33

Post by dagw »

codegladiator wrote: post #29
maxk42 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Security is a lot easier to reason about on a static site. Especially if you're leaving the server security up to, say Amazon and hosting off of S3 or a CDN.

Was security a huge problem in Wordpress ? I work in the tech industry too, but never came across security as an issue. Or is it about the plugins bringing in the unreliability ?

I haven't looked at Wordpress in years, but it used to have a terrible reputation when it came to security. Hopefully they've improved.

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

#34

Post by cddotdotslash »

codegladiator wrote: post #29
maxk42 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Security is a lot easier to reason about on a static site. Especially if you're leaving the server security up to, say Amazon and hosting off of S3 or a CDN.

Was security a huge problem in Wordpress ? I work in the tech industry too, but never came across security as an issue. Or is it about the plugins bringing in the unreliability ?

Plugins. The plugins are a never ending stream of XSS, SQLi, and other vulnerabilities. I used to intern on a web security team at Mozilla that hunted down these kinds of things and the entire experience revealed how easy it was to compromise your entire site because of a single plugin. During my six months there, I think I discovered 30+ plugins with issues. Most developers were responsive but some ignored us and the issues were never fixed.

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

#35

Post by m_t »

codegladiator wrote: post #29
maxk42 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Security is a lot easier to reason about on a static site. Especially if you're leaving the server security up to, say Amazon and hosting off of S3 or a CDN.

Was security a huge problem in Wordpress ? I work in the tech industry too, but never came across security as an issue. Or is it about the plugins bringing in the unreliability ?

Event without plugins, when your self host your wordpress you'd have to keep up with the updates.

Only having to send a bunch of static files makes it really easy.

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

#36

Post by amrrs »

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.

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

#38

Post by rayalez »

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

----

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.

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

#39

Post by johnonolan »

philfrasty wrote: post #10
pchal wrote: post #6

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.

Do you know who Ghost's intended target audience is? Their pricing at $29 (monthly) for hosting a simple blog seems bizarre when a DO droplet with pre-configured Wordpress is $5 (lots of other simpler WP hosting services out there). Edit: ok, pricing page says „For professional bloggers“

Our customers are predominantly businesses and professional users who are quite happy to pay for a fully managed service and automation to save themselves time and energy. It's exactly the same as how you can self-host WordPress or Discourse for $5 on DigitalOcean, or you can find managed services at Discourse.org and WPEngine.com for $29-$99

If you're a developer and you want to just DIY - then you can. If you'd rather just pay someone else to manage the entire thing for you - then you can.

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

#40

Post by gnode »

codegladiator wrote: post #29
maxk42 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Security is a lot easier to reason about on a static site. Especially if you're leaving the server security up to, say Amazon and hosting off of S3 or a CDN.

Was security a huge problem in Wordpress ? I work in the tech industry too, but never came across security as an issue. Or is it about the plugins bringing in the unreliability ?

I've personally never used Wordpress, but when I look at my server logs, there are always loads of requests from bots trying to attack Wordpress vulnerabilities in particular.
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