I use Hugo, with my own theme. Also created a site with a third party Hugo theme recently. I’m less impressed than I used to be. Grumpy rant warning!

• Hugo is getting worse with every release. The new mardown engine is a piece of crap. (doesn’t render pages where you have html snippets by default, as that is “unsafe”). Starting to get really pissed off by breaking something on every update, yet properly sorting and groupping the tags with non-ascii characters is still impossible. Docs on new features and concepts are lagging behind. When I started using it I used every feature, most features are unknown to me now.
• I used a third party theme for a small site which looked okay on screenshots. The code quality is sub par, it took two days to hunt down every issue caused by the author using manual link concatenation everywhere, and site in subdir, or internationalization, then deployment to AWS (due to mixed content) broke on every possible link, even when preview was fine. The whole stuff is a piece of shiny crap. Also the CSS had some issues which broke the layout when some tunable parameters of the theme (pictures) were changed. It wasn’t really semantic, used divs excessively, in my theme I used far less (with my own css instead for bootstrap). I didn’t end up saving any time with using a “ready made” solution. I’m no frontend guy, but I guess this is the kind of crap they keep pushing out (with the continuous revolution in current hip JS tech in addition), the very reason I avoid frontend work.

My 0.02$ is that if you do your own theme, then use the relRef and relURL and absURL functions instead of manually concatenating strings to build urls. Internationalization is half-baked in Hugo, that adds another layer of complexity to the theme. If you want that take care of knowing the pieces to be translated from the start.

If you use a third party theme, expect to get issues even from only replacing a single image if it is not pixel-by-pixel the same size.

my blog: https://kodfodrasz.net . The theme is hand-made, with its roots in some old-forgotten third party layout. Pictures are broken, but I don’t care. :P Fixing it is not worth the effort.

the theme I struggled with: https://themes.gohugo.io/hugo-terrassa-theme/. I liked the relative (visual) simplicity, so I hanged on to make my corrections. I hope I’ll have some capacity to contribute my fixes back some time.

I use Emacs to generate the site (the built in Org mode export plus a couple of short utility functions I wrote and hooked into the generation) and wrote up a few CSS rules to lay things out. It took a couple of nights to set up, and the code is so ugly that I don’t want anyone else to see it, but it has served me very well. Easily one of the most flexible systems I’ve used so far.

Result visible at https://two-wrongs.com

https://danluu.com is a wildly popular blog with a minimal theme. Don’t worry about the theme, worry about what you write.

I use Zola for my blog. I did the theme myself. I’m no designer but you can get a long way by choosing one nice font and following some typography guidelines, such as A Five-Minute Guide to Better Typography.

Logarion written in OCaml, an archiving system for Markdown texts. Static generation is just one aspect of it. The static generator is fast.

My personal theme: https://notes.orbitalfox.eu/

Well I personally just write html myself for my website but last time I used a static blog generator, Pelican was a real good tool. It’s powered by Python and really easy to use. You also write your content in Markdown markup.

I’ve been running Blosxom since 2004, and in static mode since 2008 or so. I stopped messing with design etc a long time ago and now try to update it at least monthly - mostly book reviews.

http://gerikson.com/blog/

I really like the Blosxom model and have at various times used to generate other kinds of feeds.

I just use a Makefile + pandoc. For my size it’s quite enough. An atom feed is generated using a AWK script.

I use zola with no theme for my blog

I use Hyde (http://wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/5/hyde) for my personal website (https://avalos.me/) and Hugo for my blog (https://blog.avalos.me/), using the Etch theme, which is pretty minimal and nice. I’m starting to think on moving my blog to Hyde as well, so I can have it along my personal website.

I am currently loving the community responses. Everyone’s blog is awesome and unique

Why do you want to switch from Jekyll?

I’m using nanoc, which I’m finding to be quite extensible, modular and powerful while remaining extremely easy to use.

Wrote my own in Python—vite. My blog’s theme is just handwritten CSS, with a little help from @nerdypepper. :) You can find my blog at https://icyphox.sh, and its source at https://github.com/icyphox/site.

I am currently in the process of building my own website and Pollen looks very interesting to me. The markup language is implemented as a Racket DSL which makes it extendable and flexible to use. When I use Markdown, there is always something missing that I need, and in Pollen I can just create my own markup elements. And whatever I need to compute or automate, I can just do that in Racket. Here is an example of custom markup that I defined.

I wrote my own thing in bash and node.js to generate my blog. I wanted to write in markdown but also use statically-rendered LaTeX. Before this, I tried Jeckyll with a KaTeX plugin, but it was slow as hell and way too complicated for my purposes.

Now, building my blog is not extremely fast, but it takes about 5 seconds instead of 10 minutes. Plus I more or less understand each part.

I use makesite.py, it is simple Python code.

I used to work with Jekyll, before I discovered Hugo a couple of years ago, and have never looked back. Honestly, the speed factor trumps everything else. Also, the fact that in typical Go fashion, it comes as a single binary that is ready to get executed as soon as you fetch it. I have had so many issues with Jekyll before, due to different Ruby versions, gems, etc. I do not want to even look back.

So, my blog uses Hugo as mentioned, together with a modified by me version of a popular theme: hello-friend-ng.

I use a script written in the rc shell, mostly just because I wanted to play with the rc shell.

Theme:

a { color: inherit; }
header { text-align: right; background: #fcf; }
main { max-width: 595px; }

Articles are stored in subdirectories en, nl etc, with en linked to the root. I only write in english though, except for one practice article in Dutch which I’m never going to publish, but as I say, the whole system is so that I can use rc.

For mine I use redo with multimarkdown with a custom css file for theme.

Having tried just about all kinds of static site generators under the sun—from the more mainstream ones like Jekyll and Hugo to more exotic ones like ssg, ox-hugo, org-page, Org publish, org-static-blog, Haunt, and even a custom one written in Haskell—I’m now back to hand-written HTML files + SSI rules (for simple templating), and love the simplicity. The only thing missing right now is an Atom feed. I wonder if I could use GNU M4 for that, like @technomancy does.

Result at https://bandali.eu.org, “sources” at https://git.bandali.eu.org/site.

I use Hugo with my own theme that was originally based on the Mainroad theme, but I rewrote most of the code so that there is not much left from the original code. But Hugo is really awesome. Maybe also take a look at the theme gallery.

My blog: https://jlelse.blog/

Wrote my own based on groff. People hate it being mobile-unfriendly so much that when my posts gain traction on the orange site that they copy my text and format it as Markdown instead. I’m satisfied with the results.

https://xorhash.gitlab.io/xhblog/

Jekyll + default AsciiDoctor stylesheet + a smudge of hand-written css for overall layout.

Example: https://matklad.github.io/2019/05/19/consider-using-asciidoctor-for-your-next-presentation.html

https://nhooyr.io

Written in typescript and react. It’s fully static but if javascript is enabled, becomes a dynamic app.

Source at https://github.com/nhooyr/blog

I’m using Hugo with a slightly modified theme for my blog. The theme is hosted at git.sr.ht.

I use Hyde for my blog and freelancing site, both with my own custom “theme”. Why Hyde? Because I enjoy using Scheme (also because I want to be dogfooding CHICKEN as much as possible), and because it’s relatively simple. Hyde does not have too many bells and whistles (in fact, it doesn’t even have ready-to-use themes as far as I know).

A long time ago i threw together a rather ugly shell script called microblog. Due to social distancing related boredem i currently picked it up again and started to refacture it. I think it has two neat advantages:

• It can be distributed as a single file
• It only depends on an external restructuredText parser

Is it ready to be used elsewhere? Kinda. I am starting to blog again so i might refine the script further if new needs pop up.

Using Zola (GH) with a custom theme (GH). Really liking it!

I wrote my own. You can see an example of its output at my blog (https://zacs.site/), and find the code on my Projects page.

My engine takes plain text files (so I can write on my phone, computer, or even at work) formatted in Markdown, and turns them in to a static site with a home page, blog and blog archive and RSS feed, and projects page. Other pages are easy to add: for example, I’ve added “Disclaimers” and “Explore” pages recently. All of this is built off a single HTML template file. My site currently contains a little over a thousand pages and takes about half a second to build. It automatically detects new or changed files, so when I’m ready to post something new, I just copy the text file over and run the script. The script takes care of rebuilding the site and deploying it from my home computer. It could just as easily be setup to run on a server, but this way I pay $0 to have a public website on Firebase’s free plan. All told, I’m pretty proud of it.

I’ve been using Hexo for a few years, primarily because it’s the first static site generator I tried and it does everything I need. My blog theme, which I just recently overhauled, is pretty bare-bones hand-written templates and CSS based on my favorite Vim color scheme, Wombat.

I use hugo. Theme is this one. Here’s the site. Despite good intentions, I mostly only manage to blog once or twice a month.

The thing I like most about my setup is the integration with hugo/gitlab/letsencrypt. The fact that all I need to do to publish a post is write a markdown file then git add/commit/push is really nice.

The only scripting required is placing this into .gitlab-ci.yml:

image: monachus/hugo

variables:
  GIT_SUBMODULE_STRATEGY: recursive

pages:
  script:
  - hugo
  artifacts:
    paths:
    - public
  only:
  - master

I use Hakyll with some minor adjustments to the default theme which is fairly minimal to begin with. The generator uses pandoc for file conversion, and if you’re familiar with Haskell it’s very configurable.

I use hugo and a theme I developed called The Horus theme my blog lives on GitHub pages at Synchronising Life & Dreams

My site is finnoleary.net

I made a program called wisp to convert S-Expressions to HTML, and I write my articles in that. It has no tracking, minimal CSS, and works fine in Lynx and other text-mode browsers.

I’ve been really annoyed back in 2012 by the time it took Jekyll and other popular contenders to generate a simple site, so I wrote my own - gostatic. It tracks changes a-la make, so it’s pretty fast.

I use it for my blog (here is the source). I’m almost satisfied by it, since having Makefile-like configuration and go templates gives back okay results - I only wish go templates were a little bit more powerful.

I use Hexo for my blog with a theme I built from scratch. I wanted a node.js SSG, in case I needed to hack around. The dev experience is pretty cool, it’s very straightforward and I chose to use EJS as my templating language.

There is also a fair amount of plugins for the features you might need (rss/atom feed, generating a json of the content…). For instance, I generate a json of all the articles titles, excerpts and tags to have a search engine.

Pelican with a custom theme: https://shalabh.com/pages/site-tech.html. I started with svbhack and over time changed it to something very different.

I use Hugo with my own, minimal theme. I used to use Jekyll as well but migrated to Hugo in 2018.

My site: https://www.dannyguo.com

Source: https://github.com/dguo/dannyguo.com

Hugo has a theme directory if that helps.

I use Jekyll, but I have this vague notion that I should make a DSL to program a static site generator, because my blog only has three types of items:

• pages (mixed md/html)
• one-off blog posts
• series of blog posts

The only thing that’s stopping me is GitHub Pages having a pipeline set up to compile and deploy my site on push… which is so easy.

I’m looking forward to SourceHut supporting pages, so I can try rolling my own.

I run Hugo, with my own CSS derived from previous iterations of my website. The site is at danilafe.com, and the source is here.

I’m actually quite happy with Hugo, though I don’t use custom lexers nor i18n. My site builds fast, and I’m able to easily extend the rendering using shortcodes. The theme was very easy to port, and I managed to switch to Hugo from a custom dynamic blog in an afternoon.

I write posts for https://technomancy.us directly in HTML, so a few M4 templates and a 13-line Makefile are all it takes: https://p.hagelb.org/Makefile.html / https://p.hagelb.org/list.m4.html

I use rib (written in Haskell, and uses shake), but indirectly through a Zettelkasten tool called neuron. Here’s my website: www.srid.ca.

Disclaimer: I’m the author of both rib and neuron. :-)

I use Eleventy and made a custom theme, cobbled together over the years. Haven’t seen that one mentioned yet, so thought I’d add it.

I use org-publish + a few scripts to generate an RSS feed and optimize the size of the website by taking advantage of a full HTML+CSS minimizer. I previously used hakyll, and nanoc. I tried to have a CSS that look like a markdown in a terminal.

my blog: https://her.esy.fun

Hugo with my own theme - https://themes.gohugo.io/black-and-light/ https://www.davidhampgonsalves.com/

Would like to host it on an ESP32 and run it on solar power, maybe I will at some point.

Wrote my blog in a static-site generator that I wrote (repo). I don’t recommend you use it; it’s probably got a lot of bugs or missing features for general-purpose use, but I had a hell of a great time making the generator.

I wrote about tech choices behind blogging years ago.

Thanks for the thread, I love reading other’s choices, finding their blogs, and wish you luck on yours! 😄

I use Zola, and I’m pretty happy with it. I wrote my own theme, but since you prefer not to do that, I think Hugo might be a better choice.

The latter has a famously annoying templating syntax, but I think its many other qualities make up for it.

Here’s my repo if you want to peek at some Zola source code: https://github.com/2mol/juricho.me

I’m still on Jekyll for my blog, although at this point I’ve spent a fair bit of effort hacking on the Hyde theme to suit my [lack of] tastes. As a publishing platform it’s proved pluggable enough and while I’d be interested in discarding the Ruby ecosystem in favor of consolidating on Python that’s not motivation enough to prioritize shaving that particular yak.

On the themes front, I’ve seen these floating around in the past and some may tickle your fancy -

• Lanyon [plus] is one I ran a while back and may revisit - http://themes.jekyllrc.org/lanyon-plus/
• Left is a nice minimal starting point - http://themes.jekyllrc.org/left/

Right now I’m using hugo, but I’m not in love with it anymore, so I rewrote the parts I needed to create a very close copy (excluding whitespaces) and wrote about it: https://f5n.org/blog/2020/a-static-site-generator/

Site is still live on hugo because I didn’t write much since then. Still planning to switch.

• Hugo site: https://github.com/winks/f5n.org
• Hugo template: https://github.com/winks/hugo-f5norg

I’m using Hakyll for my site because if you’re a Haskell person that’s almost obligatory.

Theme? I just hacked stuff together myself.

Hey! So I’ve used and/or tried out Jekyll and Hugo. I can confirm that Hugo is not for the feint of heart and seems to regress quite often! My set up is dead simple. It includes editing content, code, and deploying all in the same browser screen, and its free!

My site https://www.towardssoftware.com is hosted on repl.it! It’s awesome because I can make edits on https://repl.it and click run, and my site is updated instantly, in dev and “production”. The site’s theme is barebones because I don’t really care about the look, but hopefully this gives you a different perspective.

It’s great to have editing, and hosting in one GUI interface for simplicity. If you are more focused on writing, you want to make edits as frictionless as possible. If you are more focused on using a shiny site generator and running scripts to deploy it after every edit, there seems to be a tool to do that written in just about every programming language.

I forked frog for my own blog. I did it because I’m aware that the author has moved on from the project and there were things I wanted to work differently. I suspect that many people using frog are maintaining their own forks. I’m a Racket newbie so my interventions have been small, the main noticeable ones were bug fixes to:

• Replace “" with “/” in URLs. I believe the author was using Unix and I’m on Windows 10, so by default if you just use the normal path routines you end up with a different separator.
• Making sure the images in the RSS and Atom feeds have absolute URLs instead of relative ones.
• Lowercasing HTML file names for the tags.

There are more things I want to change but I’ll go for it slowly. As for the theme, I don’t even recall, my blog passed though so many different engines and themes. This one was ported from my old docpad fork. I’m not happy with it and want to change it soon.

I’m using XSLT (xsltproc), a bunch of shellscripts and pandoc. The “theme” is written by me. https://archive.yakubin.com/

I’m planning on rewriting it in Scheme, so it gets more legible, but I don’t have much of an incentive, as it just works.

I don’t update my website too frequently though. I have bunch of ideas about what to add there, but when I have some spare time, I almost always prefer to do something else.

I have used nanoc since several years for my blog. As part of my desire to move as much as possible to Emacs, I am currently working on porting it to a purely Org-based setup. When done, I will finally also have an English version of my blog (not that this is a nanoc restriction, but I never came around to implement it before I wanted to port everything to Org).

It’s not a blog per se, but in my main page I use Lektor. It was created by the same guy that created Flask and has a nice web UI for edit files, also I find it quite easy to write the files manually.

Pelican with mnmlst theme plus some css to add color. See https://frederik-braun.com

I use Pelican for my blog, using my own theme. I haven’t updated the content since having a third child, but I updated the backend to python3 and modern pelican a year ago. I like Pelican because it does just enough for what I want.

My own. I’ve bounced between a few of the more common ones, but there was always something that I didn’t quite like… so I decided to stop forcing other people’s tools to work for me and just wrote my own.

mine :) monopati

I just wanted a very simplistic static content generator.

I use Pelican with a custom theme. It’s all fairly minimal, set up a late Sunday night last year (says my git log). https://rasmuse.github.io/

I haven’t taken the effort to minify css etc, so you can easily borrow my theme from here: https://github.com/rasmuse/rasmuse.github.io

Edit: typo

I use Jekyll and the flexible Jekyll theme at my site