I ran my own blog for many years but recently I suspect my server got hacked, and after reinstalling I want to do things a little differently.
I’d like to move away from PHP and I don’t really need a dynamic CMS anyhow.
So far I’ve been using PicoCMS which serves content from markdown pages with a little header. I got quite good at it, wrote my own theme and a few plugins. The templating language is Twig so something similar would be a boon for me.
Writing content in markdown is my most important requirement, or rather reusing the existing pages with as little massaging as possible. Here is one example:
---
Title: Create WiFi Hotspot with NetworkManager
date: 24.11.2022
Tags: archlinux,android
template: post
---
# Make sure required depenencies are installed
blablablablablablablabla
I really want a tag cloud, which used to be my only sorting mechanism apart from date. Most generators, at first glance, offer a tags page. Honestly I have no idea if I’d have to template the cloud myself but tag functionality seems to be common, I guess?
What I don’t want is any sort of web UI or even builtin server functionality or other bells and whistles for the user. I prefer to ssh into the server and do things on the CLI.
Now my most important constraint is that I want to use what’s available in (or as a) Debian repositories. After a quick search around it boils down to:
Searching for similar topics I found this and this. I read all the comments.
TIA
edit: Lots of people mention Hugo. Why would I choose that over, say, Jekyll or Pelican?
Personally I feel drawn more towards Python than Go or Rust, and a Twig-like (e.g. Jinja) templating language. If that’s idiotic, please let me know why.
Also please remember I’m not running a github (or other similar VCS) page but have a dedicated VPS running Debian Stable. Deployment or containerization are of no interest to me.
I use quarto: https://quarto.org/
The big thing I like is that it has fulltext local search, built in and easy to enable.
Search is possible on hugo, but it’s not built in, you have to get a plugin, etc etc. Same for many other options you mentioned.
Heres my website: https://moonpiedumplings.github.io/
The search is nice, certainly a good thing to have in a blog. It has interesting features, most of which I’ll probably never use. No theming afaics but I’m sure that can be remedied. Your end result certainly looks nice enough.
Why would I otherwise sway from my hard requirements to use this? It is not in Debian’s repositories. However, a simulated install suggests that it has all dependencies bundled. What’s it really based on? Python I guess?
Quarto has theming via several built in bootstrap themes.
Quarto is written in javascript.
Also, it has no template engine/templating. I have a nasty hack where I write python code blocks (vua quarto’s ability to execute code blocks) to output markdown that can be remdered to both html and pdf, which is pretty unique. But this is probably not what most people making a website want.