Comment by pettycashstash2

7 months ago

what are your favorite static site generators? I googled it and cloudflare article came up with Jekyll,Gatsby,Hugo,Next.js, Eleventy. But would like to avoid doing research if can be helped on pros/cons of each.

I looked recently when thinking of starting some new shared blog. My criteria was "based on tech I know". I don't know Ruby so Jekyll was out. I tried Eleventy and Hexo. I chose Hexo but then ultimately decided I wasn't going to do this new blog.

IIRC, Eleventy printed lots of out-of-date warnings when I installed it and/or the default style was broken in various ways which didn't give me much confidence.

My younger sister asked me to help her start a blog. I just pointed her to substack. Zero effort, easy for her.

  • I work with Ruby but I never had to use Ruby to use Jekyll. I downloaded the docker image and run it. It checks a host directory for updates and generates the HTML files. It could be written in any other language I don't know.

I don’t have much experience with other SSGs, but I’ve been using Eleventy for my personal site for a few years and I’m a big fan. It’s very simple to get started with, it’s fast to build, it’s powerful and flexible.

I build mine with GitHub Actions and host it free on Pages.

I've come to really appreciate Astro.js It's quite simple to get started, fairly intuitive for me, and very powerful.