I'm thinking to add a blog to my personal site https://www.csabakissi.com and there are several possibilities.
The initial one was created with Blocs which is the drag/drop software to create pages on Mac based on the Bootstrap grid.
Now I want to recode it and add a blog there (probably JAM stack). Thinking about Gridsome or Nuxt as I'm using a Vue a lot. But then there is also Eleventy that seems to be pretty simple to use.
Some people suggested Gatsby to me, but I'm not into React and Gridsome is pretty much the same just for Vue.
What do you use for your landing pages/blogs? Do you use custom code or static site generators?
Absolutely. I used to use Jekyll earlier, but then switched to Hugo to scale the landing pages.
Currently, over 30 sites are running on Hugo for us, and here's how the stack looks like:
We migrated over 3000 pages from Jekyll to Hugo in two days. Wouldn't say it was a breeze, but worth it.
Hugo crushes the execution time. Jekyll is too slow.
That's my experience with Jekyll too. It was just too slow for blog with 1500 pages. Do you use custom themes for all of the sites or some standard?
We built our own UI design. Here are some of the sites:
Its insanely fast. I have a Github repo template, and makes it super easy to replicate the base code of Hugo for multiple sites.
Nice sites. Looks they're using the same customized template. I assume most of them have just few pages. Right?
The base framework is Bootstrap (stripped down version with SaaS), and the rest are all customized to each and every website. But there is at least 60% code-sharing between these sites.
My stack is [2/3] of this.
I just know about Netlify CMS, thank you for the information!
Great. Make sure to setup Identity before using Netlify CMS, or it could be out in the wild.
What do you use for forms on your static sites? I'm working on a forms backend service for static sites and would love to hear your feedback.
I have Hubspot script integrated with automatic form capture. Since it integrates directly with my CRM, and the workflow becomes seamless. Would love to explore other forms backend as well. :)
I was using Gatsby, but as of Next version 9.3 - I switched over to Next.js because the new features are so incredibly useful. They can do static generation, incremental static generation, regeneration/invalidation, server side rendering, and even serverless functions if you need a little extra (forms support etc..) all from within the default next.js package (no plugins needed). Then you can deploy to their hosting platform Vercel (global CDN deployment), which you can configure to deploy from your Github master branch with a TLS cert. It's almost too easy now.
Something similar is happening in the Vue/Nuxt ecosystem. Do you use Vercel for hosting now?
Yes, hosting my blog on Vercel. I haven't spent any time on Vue yet. Hopefully, I'll take it for a test drive this year.
I use Vercel for one of my small NodeJs backends. It's really cool.
I use Jekyll for one of my blogs (and landing pages) and Statiq for another. I'm a huge fan of static site generators because they're often faster, more reliable and more secure since they have no backend database (and WordPress hacking schemes can't penetrate since there's no WordPress).
They're also a lot cheaper (and easier) to host. I used to host my Jekyll site on Google App Engine for years under the free quota tier. It wasn't until it crossed about 100k monthly sessions did it finally pop over the free tier on outgoing bandwidth. Even today it only costs a few bucks a month to run (though it's costed a bit more the last 3 months because of how App Engine manages their frontend instance hours).
I was playing with Jekyll too but for one of my blogs, it was just too slow. It has over 1500 pages.
Did you try Netlify or Vercel for hosting?
Are you talking about the latest Jekyll version? I know they did a bunch of perf improvements...
This one with 1500 was not tested with the latest version. I'll try to test it. Thanks for the tip.
I use Hugo right now I haven't used Jekyll. I'm not 100% sure it will solve the speed issue but their copy claims it's only a few milliseconds per page.
https://gohugo.io/
You're right about Jekyll's speed - it does get sluggish the more pages you have. We use Netlify for one of our sites and I don't have any complaints. The traffic is lower so I can't compare the cost just yet and I haven't really dug into any like-for-like pagespeed comparisons.
I also use Netlify for pages and Vercel for Nodejs backend.
I've used Saber for several sites. Not as popular as other choices such as Hugo, Jeckyll, etc. but I found it much quicker and simpler to set up and super-fast site generation. Built on Vue and you can use Vue components in pages, so lots of flexibility.
I can second SaberJS. Its awesome. I just install TailwindCSS and its off to the races!
Hmm. Never used Saber. Are there some higher-quality themes available for it?
That's probably it's biggest drawback - there are only a couple of themes available.
That said, I was able to use Bootstrap to theme it without too much difficulty. I used Saber with Bootstrap 4 for the StaticForms blog.
The theme looks decent.
I'm using Gatsby for my landing page https://dogger.io.
Only took a few minutes to set up, and it just works with my existing React code.
I recently started working on a blog and am using 11ty to make it. It is awesome. No client side JavaScript by default. That is what won me over.
No client-side JS is a big advantage over Gridsome or Nuxt.
I used Eleventy last time I redid my personal website at https://marcoslooten.com
Eleventy is awesome, quick, almost no config, and mainly HTML and CSS. I have used Gatsby in the past and then you have to write React, configure Graphql, and other stuff just to get markdown working.
Eleventy is definitely simpler and for a simple blog it's probably more than powerful enough.
Hey Csaba!
Good to see you here :) As you might remember, I run a number of sites using static site generators. Mostly 11ty.dev (super simple and powerful) and VuePress for documentation-type of sites. Looking into Nuxt as it fits the natural progression into the topic atm. Hosting is on Netlify for all of them. Happy to answer any questions if you are keen to investigate these more 💪️👨💻️
Peter
Hey Peter!
Thanks. I've tested a lot of them already. Jigsaw, Jekyll, Nuxt, Gridsome, Hugo. Didn't try Eleventy so yet but I'll surely try it. I also host my static stuff on Netlify. For a small NodeJS backend, I use Vercel now. Pretty easy. For 11ty do you use ready to use themes?
Ah nice. I don't use themes really - I rather built myself something using TailwindCSS. I've used https://eleventail.netlify.com/ for the last one. Comes out of the box with Tailwind support and some neat defaults.
Thanks, Peter. I will check it out.
Yes, and I use Gatsby. My experience of React was non-existent beforehand but the ecosystem around it allows you to get up and running pretty quickly.
I've built a few sites with it already including my personal diary (https://andy.brownlie.online) & a landing page (https://businessboyscout.com)
I'm curious about Next.js but I figured I'd get some exposure to React with Gatsby which is why I went with it.
I'm using Hugo. It's pretty simple, I could customize the theme easily. Here's my blog, as an example: https://thevaluable.dev/
I've used Jekyll for all kinds of things. With Netlify you can even set up a "back-end" of sorts with forms and a pseudo-database.
I veered hard left though and ended up just starting a blogging platform. If you're looking for a bare-bones blog, check out https://bearblog.dev (it's free).
Absolutely. I used Hugo for my personal site and fell in love with it that I created themes for Hugo... you can find them on https://uicard.io
yeah, I use Gatsby.
However I don't think it's solid enough.
I'd like to try next.js
What are you missing in Gatsby? For me, Gridsome seems to be very solid.
Standard features are great and you won't have any problems. But if you try to do something slightly customized (for example customize the path of the output folder) you will have problems.
If you only need it for a blog it's ok.
Felt the same.
I was fighting it every step of the way compared to say CRA.
Nextjs is next on my list to try.
You should be able to do it from you config or node file. That's what I do on https://priocashflow.fr/blog
Ahh, got it. Thanks, for the clarification.
YES! I use 11ty for my website: https://daily-dev-tips.com/
So simple layout. And you're blogging daily.
Yeah I think the faster site wins this time over a super fancy one.
But who knows might make the layout more appealing at some stage.
You're right.
My co-founder and I are both PHP based developers mainly using Laravel so we settled on using jigsaw.tighten.co/ for our site / blog https://serverauth.com
We ended up using that in combination with deploying the static html it generates to Netlify.
I've used jigsaw too for few of my sites. It's cool I just missing the flexibility you can get with Gridsome or Nuxt.
For Portabella I'm in the process of converting to Jekyll. So convenient to have templates and code sharing in a landing page. Pretty quickly I'm thinking of all these extra pages I need to have and it's just impossible without a ssg.
Jekyll is ok for small sites. For big blogs, the speed of generating the static site is a bit slow.
For a simple landing page, no. Just HTML and CSS files. If you have more pages, let's say 5+, it's worth to convert.
I use Jekyll in particular, because I value the fact that I can hack anything if needed. Was exited to evaluate Hugo, but it feels restrictive.
Speed is a valid concern, not sure if the others in the thread tried the latest version or just remember old slow times, but for me Jekyll speed is not an issue at all.
I've tried the latest version too but for me, I didn't notice too much improvement when it comes to speed.
I don't have a big Jekyll site, just my blog. With how many pages did you notice it started to slow down?
About 1500 pages I’ve exported from WP
Yes, static site generator all the way. The content isn't dynamic enough to go for regular dynamic sites. All custom code in next.js. I am super happy with the result so far, and I host it in a kubernetes cluster on scaleway.com (I already had one for my personal blog and personal budgeting app) and all the traffic goes through cloudflare (free SSL, caching and security) for free. When I start making money, I'll definitely upgrade to a paid plan, 20 USD per month is nothing compared to what they offer.
So your target audience is mainly in the EU if you're with Scaleway. Did you try Hetzner also?
Not only EU. Having US based clients isn't going to really be a problem because latency isn't really that bad. But as it will (hopefully) grow, I'll switch to Google Cloud.
I tried hetzner a while back, I like the scaleway console interface better and they are offering a better managed kubernetes service than hetzner.
This is really interesting as, In my opinion, the Hetzner console is the best in the industry. Maybe DO can compete with it. I'll look for some screenshots.
I just switched to Gatsby and love it – was a bit of a pain to get the site built initially – but worth it to have a React app with the SEO benefits.
Now considering if I should switch from Ghost to Gatsby for my blog too.
I'm Vue dev so I've used Gridsome instead of Gatsby. But it's pretty much the same. How many pages your site have?
I have less than 10
Thats no brainer for you then.
When I build my landing page (only 1 page) I built it with plain HTML. As I added more pages I recode it with eleventy (I'm most comfortable with JS).
🤔I have to definitely look at this Eleventy as more and more people are using it.
I use hugo for my site, it's fast and relatively easier to customize the template
Do you use a custom template for your site?
no, I'm using ananke theme https://github.com/budparr/gohugo-theme-ananke although I'm working on my own custom template right now and soon will switch to it
Got it. Thank you.
For a landing page I would personally just use HTML/CSS and host the site statically.
For a blog, a static site generator makes a lot more sense, and I'd personally go for Eleventy! It's very simple compared to Gatsby/React and probably better suited for a blog.
I didn't try Eleventy, probably will in the next few days.
Good luck! I'd also suggest Tailwind CSS which can help you get the design part done quicker if you're starting from scratch.
I'm using it daily :)
I use eleventy with ghost as the CMS it works wonders. I've got a simple build going on in netlify and every time I write a new post I just run a deploy and I'm good to go!
What CMS do you use?
Sorry for the late response but yes as @ckissi mentioned I use a self-hosted instance of ghost as my CMS. I have it running on a $5 droplet on digitalocean.
@mig13 Seems @saumilpatel is using Ghost as his CMS. I'm thinking to use something self-hosted like Strapi as mine CMS.
Trying out Eleventy for my personal site. Not as popular as Gridsome or Nuxt, but it's been really easy to work with. Very fast as well as you can see here: https://www.11ty.dev/leaderboard/perf/
Cool idea to create a board like this. I love super fast sites myself.
Another shameless plug here: https://web2static.com
It allows you to use WordPress or any other dynamic site generator and convert it to static, in your current hosting. It literally offers a static/dynamic toggle switch to your site, so you can go back to dynamic anytime to add new content.
It supports forms (for some WordPress plugins you need another plugin).
I was looking forward to ask for some feedback about the landing in the coming days but...
I haven't implemented billing yet, but the platform is fully functional.
Shameless plug for my static website service: https://perspect.com
Easiest way to setup a static website and publish to it from web and mobile clients!
I'll check this as this is something I didn't notice yet.
I migrated all my blogs (https://blog.notmyhostna.me and https://annoying.technology) to Hugo now and couldn't be happier. It's very fast, easy but at the same time incredibly powerful if you want to adjust your templates. It's also very easy to host for free with Netlify.
Yeah, Hugo is the fastest one when it comes to speed.
I started using Pelican for my website and blog, because I feel comfortable with Python. It took some time to setup the design as I wanted, but now it works like a charm.
I host the code on Github and have an automatic deployment on Netlify, which also builds the site when I push to master (or a remote branch).
I was thinking of publishing my minimalistic Pelican theme, which only contains the most important feature and some tutorial to set up. Is anybody interested?
This Pelican is new to me. I'm also usually using the Github/Netlify combination.
Pelican is one of the popular Python static site generators. Similar to Jekyll, which uses Ruby.
Thanks for your clarification.
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Haha, thanks. You're the first person who mentioned this. I didn't realize it before.
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Gatsby is probably the best choise for React developers.
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Forestry seems to have a very clean UI. I personally try to avoid WP as much as possible and use Strapi or something else as my CMS.
Does it rebuild everything for every new post? And what happens on saved drafts?
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Alas, I was just trying out Gridsome and am looking at Forestry next. Seems a little weird to rebuild everything on every update.
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