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

I tried Jekyll and hated it. I didn’t find a static site generator I liked until I found Ivy.

http://mulholland.xyz/docs/ivy/

I use it for all my sites now.

For building the site I use Jekyll with a free theme I found online + some minor CSS modifications. I wanted to have js/css bundling/minification and html minification, but after spending an entire day trying to get webpack to work I gave up (what a joke). Instead I use a Rakefile that runs `jekyll build`, then does some bundling/minification - it works great.

For hosting I use cloudfront -> lambda -> s3. There is a lambda for incoming requests that handles some routing, and a lambda for responses from s3 that applies various security headers (HSTS, CSP, X-Frame-Options, X-Content-Type-Options, Referrer-Policy, Expect-CT, X-XSS-Protection).

I also have certbot (an ACME/LetsEncrypt client) running in a lambda once a day - if my TLS certificate has The whole thing is serverless, can handle arbitrary amounts of traffic & is very fast, and no maintenance at all. It costs me about $1.50 per month.

A static site generator is just a build tool. You need some way to say what your output files are, and what source files are needed to create them. This is usually hardcoded (with some parameters and ad-hoc hooks) in something like Jekyll, but could be specified with Make. I wrote a very simple timestamp checker in a couple of dozen lines of Python.

Then your scss/less->css is probably best done with the command line compiler, driven from your build tool.

And for HTML, take a template language you enjoy and write a simple driver script. If you want multiple templates, add metadata to your source files. In my case I want Markdown->HTML, using various templates, so I use YAML for the metadata, then Python's markdown compiler, and finally Jinja2 for templating. Again you can write the driver in a few dozen lines for your own purpose.

My build tools then calls The AWS API to send it to its S3 bucket, in most cases. But in one it commits to a github pages branch and pushes.

It is exceptionally simple to code your own static site generator, if you can do basic command line scripting. And doing it that way allows you to be very flexible and add things like uploading, version control, etc.

I think it's better off seen as a command line tool, than a special 'static blog generator' task. In general I think we are erring too far on the 'build a niche vertical app' rather than 'automate powerful general-purpose tools'.

At the time that I built it ACM only supported email verification. Also I'm quite fond of LetsEncrypt :)

I wrote my own for http://www.daemonology.net/blog/ . Basically it's a few template files, a /posts/ directory where I write the content of blog posts (one per file), and a shell script which generates all the html output.

Happy to share with anyone who wants it. Some day I'll get around to putting it up on github.