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

Hello HN community,

I've been meaning to start blogging for a while now but I never got around to it. I do have some time this weekend and I thought I'll give it a whirl then.

I recently read about Hugo and I was wondering if it's good enough for me to start with? Has anyone used it? How has your experience been so far?

My posts will mainly focus on little programming tidbits that I learn while I'm working so yes, it will involve code snippets. Markdown support is a huge pro for me as well. I am aware of Jekyll as it's one of the biggest players in this segment but everyone's been complaining about its speed which is why I'm not leaning towards it.

If anyone's got some advice on what SSG I can use, fire away. If you can, highlight both the pros and cons so I can make an informed decision on this.

Thank you for your time! Cheers!

Gatsby is worth taking a look at.

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 and blog entries, upload media, cropping images, etc.; (5) it has a variety of static site generation plugins to choose from; and (6) I spent hours looking at hugo, pelican, etc. and realized that any minor qualm I had with any of these common solutions was more or less addressed by the large and robust community of WordPress developers and enthusiasts.

It's not a sexy answer, but it's practical. Just make sure you don't leave the WordPress site you use to generate static content open to the public.

Git and GitHub Pages: Simple to set up and use, supports Markdown and code snippets.

Other than that I've never really understood the appeal of static site generators for normal websites or blogs that don't have millions of monthly page views.

Tools like Hugo for many common use cases (like ordinary websites with ordinary scalability requirements) often come across as a solution desperately looking for a problem while at the same time creating a few new problems: Compared with dynamic website software like WordPress they can be difficult to set up and they tend to be more difficult to use, especially for non-technical users.