Refresh

After three years, it’s maybe time to refresh this website.

Besides all the other home-related Information Technology (IT) tasks on my massive To Do list, I want to evaluate static website development environments, like Nue, Hugo, and 11ty. This is that report. But, it’s a work in progress, so at the moment it isn’t fleshed out. In fact, I might not replace what I have, but instead just update Jekyll from 3.10.0 to 4.4.1 and update the theme. I haven’t decide yet. The current theme is Jasper2 (a clone of Ghost’s Casper theme) which hasn’t been updated in five years.

For those who don’t drink the koolaid, a static web site is one where all the contents and assets are created once, copied to a stand-alone web server, and just served as files over HTTPS, like 9code.ch is.

A dynamic website, on the other hand, will have the web server (or usually another connected server) create pages on the fly by consulting databases and querying other services — like Ghost does. This allows a lot more flexibility. For example, the pages can be served from a Content Management System (CMS), and the web pages and their content can be tailored to the person viewing them. Although I’m pretty sure my little server could run it, I don’t really need that much power, since it’s just a blog that doesn’t change very much and there is no web store to sell things… yet.

It gets a little confusing when a static website can serve client-side Javascript which can make a website look dynamic, usually in a single-page application (SPA), like the Souvenir page on this web site.

Besides the cringe-worthy esthetics I tossed up as a first version, I’m not happy with the Jekyll system I have now. It looks like Jekyll has finally been abandoned for real and it’s difficult to modify it — mostly because I don’t grok ruby. For example, changing the cascading style sheets (CSS) involves a separate compile step using Gulp.

The things I’m looking for, include a short list of criteria:

Criteria	Jekyll	Nue	Hugo	Eleventy
Language	Ruby	Javascript	Go	Javascript
Composition	Markdown + YAML properties	Markdown + YAML properties	Markdown + assigned properties	Markdown + YAML properties
Migration	None	issues with pagenation, tags, and theming	can theme with bootstrap, pagination and keyword support	bootstrap (11straps), pagination, tags supported
Menu	Manually via navigation.html
Thumbnail	Separate step in Gimp		does image manipulation
Comments	Manual link to Mastodon

I have no idea how difficult it would be to yank these around to do what I want. This is just the first step in the process.

If you think this is a rabbithole, you’re right. Here’s a list of 53 Awesome Static Site Generators, and it doesn’t even list Nue.

Leaning towards Hugo (“The world’s fastest framework for building websites.”) even though I hate Go because their enforced, opinionated indentation style is K&R and mine is Allman.