8
dmonkey
324d

I've been out of the loop with websites and frontends for a while. Now, is it me or is it just overengineered to make a static website that's not a blog these days?

I mean, I need to make a landing page. 6 sections + footer. And I don't want to end up with a 600+ lines html file. With tailwind possibly.

JEKYLL
I've used it a few times, and after 3 years I still get some weird error when installing everything. Maybe it's trivial, but I know shit about ruby. Plus, I don't need ruby for anything else, and the official Docker image just doesn't work, exactly like the quickstart tutorial. 3 years later, same issues.

HUGO
I like this guy but god, the docs are just unreadable, it's not compatible with tailwind 3.x (or smth) and it's been a pain to build a user-configurable homepage. Plus, it does more than half of the work by itself, Fair enough, it's supposed to be used for blogs.

ANY OTHER "JAMSTACK" BULLSHIT
Anything is either a blogging engine or delivers some crappy javascript blob from hell. I just need an html document, that weird thingie the whole World Wide Web was built upon, broken into pieces so I can keep my sanity.

Looking forward to get the fucking AWS Solutions Architect. Looking even more forward to build my farm.

Comments
  • 4
    I like your approach: trying stuff out and seeing what annoys you and then looking for alternatives.

    Jekyll and Hugo are still relevant but there are lots of newish options which have SSG but can also be extended. Like nuxt

    This video starts off with some subjective recommendations like

    * Astro if you want tailwind
    * Eleventy if you have many pages
    * Hugo if you like Golang

    I https://youtu.be/S7X6fLbdwlc
  • 1
    jamstack.org/generators is a good overview Allthough overwhelming.

    For a simple site the big choice is templating language. jsx is the most popular in general but if you tried it and dislike it or dislike react...look at Eleventy at 11ty.dev/docs
    it supports multiple template languages.

    I use nunjucks (I consider it an upgrade over Handlebars and Mustasch) but honestly the syntax can be a bit odd with conditional statements like "if x or y"

    sometimes I kinda miss being able to write conditional statements with js, as you can in jsx.
  • 1
    NextJs should men mentioned if you like jsx

    Previously that project was SSR focused but recently added SSG. You can set an option to "export" and it'll just build an html file.

    haven't used it myself but it's such a popular and active project so I wouldn't be surprised if the docs and community are great.
  • 2
    Just write your own SSG for such a use case. You know why there are hundreds of them? Because they all suck in some way.

    Either by lacking some crucial feature, or by including that feature and 1337 others, but being so complicated to use that you get the job done faster by just rolling your own SSG. BTDT.
  • 1
    +1 for 11ty. Initially I was pretty overwhelmed too because a lot of SSG have lots of secret conventions that only serve to trip one over, but give 11ty 30 mins, start with a hello.md
    Then make an html (it’s really either nunchucks or liquid, but all it is is html with extra stuff) layout with {{ content }}
    and on the header of your hello.md specify the layout you just made on html… and that’s all you need!
  • 1
    @jiraTicket Thank you for the suggestions. I will give them a chance in the future. Also I didn't notice Next.js had ssg support.

    Meanwhile, I actually found a hugo theme with tailwind that worked out of the box -- I think I'll reach the author to buy him a beer.
  • 1
    @Fast-Nop I seriously considered the idea. My use case is SO simple that I could use some 50-80 lines bash script to get the job done.
  • 0
    @benj Good to know, thank you, I'll give it a try
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