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Static Site Generator (SSG) software
For some time now I’ve been thinking I should set up a blog. It would give me a much needed web presence for promoting myself for employment, contract work, or self-employment. I already have nearly ten years worth of content (these notebooks,) but in reality if I put up only the last five years it would be more than sufficient.
For me, the best way to approach this would be to host the content on my Group BCL domain, although that would ential a bit of extra cost on my part to get the web hosting. I could get that though my registrar at Sibername for $4.00/month, or at Valuehost (who already hosts my email), or at a third party such as local company Pegboard Hosting (which just happens to be owend by a MUUG member) for $9.00/month.
Given that most of my material is already in Markdown format and I’d prefer not to use the uber-popular but not-all-that-secure WordPress software, I figured I could use a static site generator for this. Last week I came up with a candiate list of [static site blog software], and this week I decided to evaluate the candidates.
To aid with the evaluation, I set up a Fedora 30 VM on raven called simply “ssg” (static site generator.)
Evaluation criteria
My criteria are:
- The notebook files contain the primary source material for the blog entries. It should be traightforward to extract content and feed it to the software to produce new entries, or completely rebuild the site.
- The software must run on my home system, to reduce the possibility of it disappearing from the web.
- I need to be able to upload the entire site or just new entries and the updated index information using FTP or scp.
- The product chould be able to use Python Markdown for renderiing markdown, prefereably with my extensions
- I’d like themes to give my blog a nicer look than the output from my default CSS
- I’d like the site to have an RSS feed
- It would be nice to be able to have comments, but that means I’d have to moderate the site. Comments can be put into the site itself, or can be stored in a database, provided I can get database dumps.