Looked at a few more static site generators, looking for a simple one, based on responses in a “Hacker News comment section on Hugo today”. Here are some more mini reviews.
Of these, I think 11ty had the most promise for me.
“Cobalt”
This is another very minimal SSG, I’d put it in the realm of “gostatic” as being too minimal except for extremely minimal uses or if you want to build the HTML templates yourself.
“Lektor”
This is a CMS that builds a static site, so when you have Lektor running locally in development mode, you can go in and do edits, create new posts, etc… It looks like the content is in a proprietary format, where everything else I’ve looked at so far could handle markdown with frontmatter. But, I don’t have so much content that it would be hard to move over, and the body is still markdown. The admin interface is solid but minimal. I didn’t try any themes, just used the quickstart blog setup.
“11ty”
This was pretty offputting because it requires Node 14 which I don’t have installed, and the quickstart is “echo out to an html page and a markdown page. Looks like this is what I’m going to call a “SSG Engine”, even more minimal than Cobalt or gostatic, but with the big benefit that it has many “Starter Kits” which are largely git cloneable setups that you start with and have all the extra pieces added. This has the promise of being able to deliver advanced pages, in a simple setup. However, the downside is that there are SOOOO MANY starter kits out there, with varying quality and documentation.
I was able to get a simple blog up using a starter kit called “Eleventy High Performance Starter Kit”. I tried 3 others, all of which failed in some way. Including the “11straps” which looked like it was built by the 11ty people, that one looked great, but there was what looked like an issue with a package server hanging, the install “npm install” just hung.