I want something that is:
- SSG (static site output)
- looks nice
- is a template I can use out of the box by just dropping in my content and configurations, rather than designing or building myself
- is not feature-poor. I want it to have features like footnotes, jump-to-section links, citations, on-hover pop-ups for citations or footnotes, syntax highlighting for code blocks, etc.
- nice to have: ability to draw basic graphs or diagrams (helps in technical explanations)
- is not too difficult to customize by editing the code directly, Customizing the looks, structure, or adding functionality if I needed
Programming language doesn’t matter much. I can use whatever. I do have a preference for functional languages.
Eleventy seems like a great framework to do this, but as I said I want a template that’s ready out of the box not just a framework. The blogging template I found for eleventy does not look as nice as I hope.
I’m basically a doofus when it comes to web. I had no trouble using Zola as the generator with Abridge and Terminimal as themes.
+1… Started using Zola and built on top of it to learn scss, javascript, and HTML. All that extra building was not required for a running site but was still a great learning experience.
I also enjoyed Zola. Ended up switching off of it, but I think it’s a great way to directly jump into writing content. The only reason I switched off was because I wanted more control than it would provide, but for most cases, I think it’s completely fine.
Hugo?
The review I read about Hugo is that it is not very easy to customize client side code (html / js). Do you find this to be the case?
Honestly couldn’t really tell you. I haven’t used it but I was thinking about it.
Framework-wise, I really like Astro. They have some themes you can explore here.
I’m not sure if any themes support charts, graphs, and diagrams out of the box, but they use remark and rehype to convert markdown to html, so you could look for a rehype plugin to do it and add it to your config if you want. For example, you could try using
rehype-mermaidto generate diagrams using mermaid.Use Quartz and Obsidian because it’s easy. If not mcdocs.
11ty + a classless CSS stylesheet might get you extremely close.
Edit: spelling, hyperlinks.