Hugo?
this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
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Programming
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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?
Honestly couldn't really tell you. I haven't used it but I was thinking about it.
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.
I'm basically a doofus when it comes to web. I had no trouble using Zola as the generator with Abridge and Terminimal as themes.
+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.
I also enjoyed Zola. Ended up switching off of it, but I think it's a great way to directly jump into writing content. The only reason I switched off was because I wanted more control than it would provide, but for most cases, I think it's completely fine.
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!
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.
Hugo with a simple theme like book or paper should do it. Alternatively Jekyll or Docusaurus, in principle they're all the same in that they process markdown files and dump out a static site.
Astro for a more feature rich "development" experience.
Framework-wise, I really like Astro. They have some themes you can explore here.
I'm not sure if any themes support charts, graphs, and diagrams out of the box, but they use remark and rehype to convert markdown to html, so you could look for a rehype plugin to do it and add it to your config if you want. For example, you could try using rehype-mermaid to generate diagrams using mermaid.
Use Quartz and Obsidian because it’s easy. If not mcdocs.