I spent a lot of time researching different solutions for a blog before deciding to keep it simple. I was obsessed with a few qualities that I later decided weren’t important.
These qualities were:
- Static site on first load
- Allow JavaScript to be turned off
- Evolve into a progressive web app with asynchronous loading
I used this site to find and compare different solutions.
In particular, I’ve evaluated: Cryogen, Jekyll, Next, Gatsby, and Hugo. After trying to use Next and Gatsby I decided that they were just too complicated and my new list of important features became:
- Static site
- Allow JavaScript to be turned off
- Ease of use
- Will be maintained in long-term future
Based off of #3 I immediately removed Next off the list, and the combination of #2 with #3 removes Gatsby. I think those frameworks are certainly good, but for what I’m doing they are overkill. I was tempted to not look at Jekyll either because I’ve had horror stories with RubyGems, but for the sake of science I’ll actually include all projects on the Static Gen site (including Next/Gatsby even though I won’t be picking them).
With Hugo and Pandoc supporting org-mode, I can write all of my notes, blog posts, resume’s, etc in a single markup language and convert them to HTML, PDF, or even man pages. I, generally, stick to markdown as it’s certainly the simplest of markups, but there’s a huge power with org-mode that I’m slowly starting to master.