Ask HN: What is setup for your static blog generator?

I use wordpress.

add a plugin from the repo "simply static" - generate the html files.

download, then ftp.

It's not elegant and lean like the others - but it's saved me a ton of time for the use cases I've used it for.

There is another decent static generator in the repo, but it failed on a recent site I was trying yesterday, so it's not on my currently using list.

I know it's possible to put wp dynamic files on a server and use a domain mapping plugin to generate files for a bunch of domains on the same server easily - could probably find someone smarter than me to add in this simply static plugin and mod it to shoot the files to the sub domains...

then just install a bunch of themes and other plugins to the main install - and might be kind of heavenly for a lot of situations.

Some of my wp sites need contact forms - so I'm leaving those live / dynamic. If it was easier to make and upload something like the coffee cup form builder files I'd convert a few more sites to static files this week.

If someone found a way to use the wordpress themes with these other generators it would be awesome. Then it would just be the few sites that need the extra plugins power that really need the wordpress php files and such. One can dream.

I had similar problems to yours: I wanted total control but I also wanted it to be quick and easy when I’m writing a new post or page.

So I made my own tool.

With this tool (which I dubbed ‘Wabi’) you put a bunch of files in a folder and the files are processed and copied to a corresponding location in an output folder.

Files with metadata at the top are processed specially and can be used as templates or to write markdown files that are turned into pages.

Wabi helps you setup Git integration so that when you run the “publish” command all local changes are immediately published to your website. I didn’t want to mess around with git stuff most of the time so I implemented that command so I could publish iteratively and quickly.

Wabi is sort of my answer to wanting control over how I build my website, while also wanting a tool that does not get in the way of the creative parts of making and running a website.

That said, it’s of no use to you because it’s completely undocumented and not polished, but probably over the next few months I’ll fix it up as I use it to create my own personal website. For those interested you can check out the source (it’s written in Go): https://github.com/kettle11/wabi

Heavily customised Jekyll to get the following features working:

* Code snippets with syntax highlighting * Embed the results of computations like plots * Mathematical figures * Bibliographic citations * Footnotes

Wrote about it (https://curious.observer/articles/a-modern-blog/), but didn't get to "blogging" until now :)

Just write some markdown files in a flat directory, have a React-SSR app that reads the files and passes the content as props to the app, through a markdown-html component, then just render the it to a raw string. You can do this in tens of lines of code. You can save your script and pass it any markdown files as input, generating any blog you want. Add in a pics/ folder that gets uploaded, and then just locally reference those in your html. I would do this over Wordpress any day. Wordpress is too complicated for me.

The thing I've never figured out with my Pandoc-generated static sites is how to generate RSS feeds from Markdown frontmatter metadata.