HACKER Q&A
📣 PaulHoule

Static site generator for technical blog articles?


I'm thinking about getting back into blogging again and I like the idea of systems like Hugo but I am interested in writing things that are meaty and technical and the mainstream of these systems seems to be quite the opposite: frequently templates look like Medium and seem to think whitespace is more important than content. I'd like to embed diagrams, tables, equations and do it all without it being a maintenance nightmare. I've been seeing LaTeX-based systems since 1997 and think they still are butt ugly (sorry, even if italic fonts are right for math the particular ones these use look atrocious on the web.)

Any suggesions?


  👤 digitalsanctum Accepted Answer ✓
My recommendation would be Jekyll. You can host it for free on a variety of hosts including GitHub (pages) and Vercel. It has support for "data files" which can easily be presented as tables. In the case of GH pages, there's built in support for code syntax highlighting and support for embedded mermaid diagrams. For the cases where mermaid is not enough, GH supports SVG format.

👤 PaulHoule
Some examples of the kind of thing I want to write are

https://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/

and

https://ontology2.com/essays/PropertiesColorsAndThumbnails.h...

and

https://ontology2.com/the-book/decimal-the-missing-datatype....

which I'd say I'm happy with the appearance of but I generated with some half-baked stuff I wrote myself years ago and don't have good answers for generating navigation, RSS feeds, and all that.