I want something that is:
- SSG (static site output)
- looks nice
- is a template I can use out of the box by just dropping in my content and configurations, rather than designing or building myself
- is not feature-poor. I want it to have features like footnotes, jump-to-section links, citations, on-hover pop-ups for citations or footnotes, syntax highlighting for code blocks, etc.
- nice to have: ability to draw basic graphs or diagrams (helps in technical explanations)
- is not too difficult to customize by editing the code directly, Customizing the looks, structure, or adding functionality if I needed
Programming language doesn’t matter much. I can use whatever. I do have a preference for functional languages.
Eleventy seems like a great framework to do this, but as I said I want a template that’s ready out of the box not just a framework. The blogging template I found for eleventy does not look as nice as I hope.
+1… Started using Zola and built on top of it to learn scss, javascript, and HTML. All that extra building was not required for a running site but was still a great learning experience.
Hugo?
The review I read about Hugo is that it is not very easy to customize client side code (html / js). Do you find this to be the case?
Have used Hugo, and I don’t really know what you mean by ‘not very easy to customize client side code’. Hugo works with ‘themes’, which you can either download online, or create yourself. Customizing CSS, JS and even the HTML structure can easily be done by modifying/patching said theme.
Honestly couldn’t really tell you. I haven’t used it but I was thinking about it.
Jekyll is what I use. There’s a lot of canned themes out there: https://jekyllrb.com/docs/themes/
I use Jekyll too. It’s got to be one of the easier solutions out there. Not to mention, integration with GitHub/Cloudflare pages is great.
I don’t know a good template, but whatever you choose make sure it uses Markdown for the post format. Markdown was originally designed for exactly your use case. The Daring Fireball blog has been using Markdown for 20 years now.
There are variants of markdown, and I’d go with Github Flavoured Markdown which has all the features you require and has quite a few improvements over the original spec:
For the few things it can’t do, like embedding graphs — Markdown is a superset of HTML, meaning that arbitrary HTML is valid Markdown. You could, for example, use D3.js.
Personally I would also use GitHub as my distribution method. Write your posts in any text editor, push to GitHub, and then a GitHub action triggers an action that re-generates the HTML and publishes your site.
That approach will work well and if it ever stops working well you can easily move part of your system to something else without reinventing the entire thing.
Markdown was originally designed for exactly your use case. The Daring Fireball blog has been using Markdown for 20 years now.
I always forget how old Markdown is. And the syntax it’s inspired from - plain-text email - has been in use for even longer!
11ty + a classless CSS stylesheet might get you extremely close.
Edit: spelling, hyperlinks.
Use Quartz and Obsidian because it’s easy. If not mcdocs.
