Static blog generators

Web development?

When I was originally thinking about a blog I wasn’t really interested in doing the building and design of the website myself myself, I wanted something functional straight out of the gate.

I had heard of static website generators before and they seemed like the right choice for a simple blog. I don’t need any fancy javascript libraries to write things down, I want it to be fast but still look presentable of course.

My initial search landed me on various websites listing many different static website generator applications, way more than I initially expected.

Due to having recently done a hobby project in Python (Might write about that another time..) I landed on the static site generated called Pelican.

Pelican

Pelican is based on Python and I thought the language might be relevant in case I wanted to make some changes. Out of the box it is very easy to set up a basic website using just the quick-start afterwards you can get right to writing content.

The quick start consists of just four steps and afterwards you’re good to go.

After some tinkering I had a running blog with an article but the default style of Pelican was kinda boring to me. I looked through the various community created themes as well but nothing really popped out which had the functionality I was looking for. Seeing that I wasn’t really going to need to touch any Python with Pelican I decided to pivot to a different Tool.

Jekyll

Jekyll is from what I’ve seen probably the most popular static website generator around the web right now. This of course like most things on the internet leads to a lot of community support for it. Before committing to setting it up I went looking for a fitting theme that I liked. After a bit of searching on jekyllthemes.org website I landed on the “Hydeout” Theme. I like the clean aesthethic as well as that it’s well documented and allows for some easy customizations.