I’m looking for a tool to generate a simple personal website (like an online business card) to self host. Preferably a static site generator.
I’m now using Hugo, but it does too much for me and changes too often. (I can’t update my current page, because the template is no longer arond)
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Have fun picking through the many options, haha. I just figured out Ghost (open source blogging platform) but it can easily be edited with static pages. It is basic but I am okay with the functionalities and ease of use
Create a custom hugo template that you can maintain yourself however and whenever.
I suggest one of the many wonderful one-page templates available on GitHub, Codeberg, et. al. GitHub has a whole topic on them at https://github.com/topics/single-page-site. You pick one that matches your requirements and that looks good to you, change the text, and serve.
I like to use bootstrap studio for website design.
Another tool, not sure it will fit your needs exactly, called reactive resume. Might be able to use it as a business card.
I know its old and unmaintained, but I really like picoCMS. its just a markdown to HTML site thing, but I cant find any replacement
According to their GitHub https://getgrav.org/ is an “excellent alternative”.
yes, but no.
All the alternatives I have looked at had a re-setup tax that I didnt want to get into, also none of them had the easy editing that pico has. you just point it at a collection of markdown files and you get a site out.
For a simple links-only page I’m using Linkstack, and there’s also littlelink
You could just do it manually. Write the HTML an CSS.
Now there’s a radical idea. Might actually do this xD
You don’t even need to learn HTML to do it. Any word processor will ‘save as HTML,’ but the markup should be straightforward enough for anyone considering selfhosting. CSS can be a real rabbit hole, but browser default styles aren’t awful.
I don’t think there is really any learning curve to “learning HTML” if you are not trying to do anything funky and you just want a simple static website that functions, like OP said, “like a business card”. You may as well just type it out yourself. If you’ve never written HTML before just look at w3schools.
And then host it on https://neocities.org/
This is the only correct answer in this entire thread.
+1!!
I found this guide very inspiring: https://melonking.net/thoughts/lets-make
It focuses on the creativity and self-creation aspect of writing your own websites. The site is quirky but also geniune.
This is so cool, thanks for sharing! I’m really excited about the “indie web”, being a network of expressive people being people rather than just a giant commerce machine.
My HTML/CSS skillset is abysmal, so I went with Hugo and deployed the repository onto cloudflare. It was up in minutes.
If you know some Python, I’d look at Flask. It might be overkill for a static site but it’ll leave the door open for future expansion. If your goal is minimal effort, this is probably not the way to go.
I used https://html5up.net/ found a nice one and customized it for myself
Screech all you want, Copilot. It’ll take 10 minutes to get an MVP and you can just tweak from there.
It might be overkill, but my website xylight.dev is written in Svelte with the framework Sveltekit. I use the
adapter-staticand disabled the client JavaScript withexport const csr = falsein my+layout.ts.I really like Svelte since it lets me write reusable components really quickly, with very native feeling markup that, once I prerender it, expands into normal HTML.
I wrote my own set of tools in python that convert a simple gemtext formatted .gmi file into a static HTML file thats served by apache.
I’m a big fan of the Gemini Protocol project and found that handwriting pages in gemtext was ideal for focusing on text content and not worrying about formatting. Converting it to HTML+CSS with some scripts is pretty easy.
If anyone’s interested I can give a link, currently just hosting source locally on my website, really should get a public github running.
People are going to hate this, but AI is perfect for this. You can literally just ask it to make whatever you want the website to look like in natural language and it will give you the code and generate a html page for you to preview.
