Hello everyone! I was thinking about starting a website where to dump some guides on stuff Iearn about selfhosting and general IT stuff.

I don’t want a WordPress or similar. I want static pages (but I’m ok with some JavaScript for navigation maybe, or for proper display on different kind of devices). Ideally I’d like to host it on an AWS S3 bucket since it has the built-in option for static hosting.

I could even go back to the '90s and do it myself from scratch in textedit and html by hand, but I’m pretty sure there are better options out there.

I took a look at Hugo but even that it seems overly complicated for what I need.

Any ideas or suggestions?

Thanks!

  • String@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    4 months ago

    I’ve been meaning to change my website from Hugo to Zola. It has a few good themes to choose from and it’s easy to set up. Hugo has way more themes though.

    You might want to check out a lot of SSGs to see what themes each has, and pick the one you like the most.

    • manuel2258@lemy.lolEnglish
      3·
      4 months ago

      I build my website using Zola, which worked pretty good. However I wasn’t satisfied with the existing templates so I did build my own using DaisyUI. That also worked pretty good most of the time and was a pleasant experience!

  • mbirth@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    4 months ago

    GitHub supports Jekyll page generation. Or at least did this a few years ago.

    And please make sure to also generate an RSS feed for us feed reader users. ;)

  • yggdar@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    4 months ago

    DocFx could do what you’re looking for. You would write your stuff in markdown and it generates an interactive and customizable site.

  • chips@startrek.websiteEnglish
    2·
    4 months ago

    Hey there! For a friendly and simple static site generator, you might wanna check out Jekyll. It’s pretty lightweight, works great with Markdown, and has a nice community. Plus, it’s super easy to deploy on S3. You can still hand-code if you want, but Jekyll will save you a bunch of time!

  • keyez@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    I had a workflow a few years ago where I ran and configured a local drupal instance, then ran this HTTrack tool which would export all the pages and images to flat HTML which I then zipped and pushed to an S3 bucket to host the website. Worked great because it just needed to host info, no comments or accounts or anything.

    https://www.httrack.com/

  • Moonrise2473@feddit.itEnglish
    4·
    4 months ago

    What about Publii?

    WYSIWYG static site generator but personally I like to keep the content in markdown pages in a git repository so i can keep unlimited edit history; this saves everything in a local sqlite database.

    Unfortunately the most powerful one that checks all the boxes, including automatic upload to s3 is hugo, but as you said the learning curve is high. Maybe try to see if you can run the example site of this theme, install hugo in your system, then go in the examplesite directory and run hugo serve. Slowly edit the files until you understand how it works.

  • pixxelkick@lemmy.worldEnglish
    271·
    4 months ago

    I use Hugo, it’s not super complicated.

    You basically just define templates in pseudo html for common content (header, nav panel, footer, etc), and then you write your articles in markdown and Hugo combines the two and outputs actual html files.

    You also have a content folder for js, css, and images which get output as is.

    That’s about all there is to it, it’s a pretty minimalist static site generator.

    Hosting wise you can just put it on github pages for free.

    • godber@lemmy.az.socialEnglish
      13·
      4 months ago

      The other advantage of Hugo is that it’s just a single binary executable. Using something like Jekyll means you have to manage a ruby environment over the long term. Which sucks. I’d recommend trying Hugo again and getting past the pain points.

  • Adam@doomscroll.n8e.devEnglish
    10·
    4 months ago

    Hugo can be as simple as installing it, configuring a site with some yaml that points at a really available theme and writing your markdown content.

    It gets admittedly more complex if you’re wanting to write your own theme though.

    But I think this realistically applies to most all static site generators.

  • daco@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    I use Nikola and it hasn’t let me down. It just works and supports all the ways I write content: markdown, asciidoc, rest, Jupiter Notebooks, html and so on. It does not have so many themes, but the default one works and it’s not hard to customise if needed. If you like to use python it’s also easy to extend. I’ve written a bit about Nikola here in case it picks your interest.

    I’ve deployed it to CloudFlare pages, but GitHub pages, Gitlab pages and any other provider also work.

  • thisfro@slrpnk.netEnglish
    4·
    4 months ago

    You could write your content in markdown and use pandoc to generate a html file. Add header/footer in template if you want

    • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      4 months ago

      This is probably the simplest option. I’ve seen a good number of simple yet functional and pretty sites built in markdown and converted to html via some simple tool like pamdoc.