Tonight I migrated the "staging environment" of my little, static website to another VPS and upgraded from ruby2/jekyll3 to ruby3/jekyll4.. It wasn't too much of a hassle and I really like using jekyll, but it still feels like it's too many moving parts and shit like ~400 MB ruby for the purpose of a simple website.. That search for the "perfect" solution isn't over I guess.. Any recommandations fediverse? Good night! #jekyll#ssg#static_site_generator#webdev
@jlsksr I used #Jekyll for years and was very happy with it, but yeah, it’s a lot of “stuff” locally. I’m now using @getkirby and I’m very happy.
If you prefer to use an SSG, the one I was considering a move to was @eleventy, lots of people like Hugo too, but I don’t get that as their templating makes my brain melt. Good luck.
I've wanted to revamp my site’s Search capability for a while now. Up until recently, I've used super-search.js which came bundled with the #Jekyll theme I chose years ago. It’s fast but only seems to index a small portion of each page so if I want to search full-text in longer-bodied posts I was out of luck (I tried tweaking it but was unsuccessful, which isn't to say it can't be done by a more competent / patient tinkerer). #indieweb#webdev#IndieWebChat#ssg
More recently, I've implemented #lunrjs (https://lunrjs.com) which was pretty easy to get set up in my dev environment. It indexes pages by individual search terms so is not as strong at searching for phrases (multiple words) as super-search was, but for what I often need to search for, this is a compromise I’m willing to take in order to get full-text search of everything on the site.
You run a #Perl script to generate an #SQLite database with an index of all the #HTML files, publish it, and then embed some #JavaScript which uses sql.js to query the contents of the database and display search results.
@Daojoan I'm just a nerdy country boy, but it seems like a registered domain that is an approximation of your name, with some decent SEO would net you the same benefits as medium/substack and you would only be beholden to a minimum of technical requirements. If you used a static blog system like #Jekyll, you'd be able to write everything in markdown (nearly plain text), publish quickly and not have to worry about weird platform problems. It also wouldn't cost much (<$100/yr).
Can no longer afford Wordpress site, so I'm dusting off some … extremely … rusty web dev skills to set up a free static site through Github pages. If anyone has a Wordpress to Jekyll export plugin to recommend, I'd appreciate it. #webdev#Jekyll#Wordpress
I can’t overstate how much I hate #CSS. Extremely humbling trying to do anything resembling good, “modern”, responsive #webdesign. Been working on some heavier under-the-hood changes to my #githubpages-based #jekyll#staticwebsite and wow my eyes and soul hurt.
A related question, anyone ever implement full-body text search on a static site / Jekyll site before? I’ve been looking into maybe lunr.js…
Those of you who use a static site generator for your blog (#11ty, #Jekyll, etc), what's your workflow for writing posts? Do you write them in a markdown editor and then copy it to your IDE when you're ready to publish (which is what I do), or do you do something else?
I am looking to switch up my workflow and I'm curious about what others do. Let me know!
Quite some years ago I switched to static websites. I don't need (more precise: don't want) any kind of active pages as it is simply not needed for my blog or other sites I have. And working with #jekyll is still a wonderful experience. Exactly because Jekyll hasn't changed much over many years. It does what it does, in simple and reliable ways. A git repo with markdown documents, a shell command, a git commit and boom. Site updated. No struggles with databases etc. I like.
Now, I am realizing it is becoming quite cumbersome to maintain and to adapt to the changeable nature of my craziness. Code is messy and probably a bit bloated, I am not so expert or have enough time to work on improving the performance…
maybe it is time to start using a framework or something, but I have no idea about this stuff. My only imperatives are not to have any front end #JavaScript and have as little abstraction as possible. I would just like to make my life easier and keep the development of my personal website a fun thing to do rather than a stressful chore.
Any thoughts? Suggestions? Please feel free to digress, I am eager to learn about the topic.
I publish today the free software #Jekyll#MapLibre (pre-release; MIT license) – a plugin for static websites for easy self-hosting of maps.
I proved to myself that privacy-friendly self-hosted (as opposed to #GoogleMaps in the cloud) #maps for displaying locations on websites can be accomplished in a few days with minimal resources. In the future, I will consider this as my new baseline when looking at #GDPR Art. 25 (data protection by design and by default).
Hello helpful friends of the Fediverse! I am considering a major rearchitecture of my site, https://shellsharks.com (and adjacent properties) and wanted to get some advice/tips from the wider #indieweb, #blogging, #openweb, #webdev, #webdevelopment communities out here. (Sorry for the long read!)
Currently, my site is hosted on Github Pages which uses #jekyll for static site generation. I've been using this for nearly 5 years and for the most part have no complaints. The service has decent uptime, is pretty customizable (custom CSS, JS, etc...) and after all this time I am pretty comfortable using it. Some things I am interested in though in terms of re-architecting...
Fediverse / ActivityPub compatibility - #wordpress has gone live with their AP plugin and sites like micro.blog (I think) have some direct AP functionality. I'm interested in exploring this but it's not necessarily a must-have. More on Fediverse point of presence later...
IndieWeb functionality - I've baked in as much IndieWeb stuff as I can reasonably do with Jekyll hosted on Git Pages but would be interested in WebMention and other more advanced capabilities if offered by another platform / static-site generator.
I've toyed with the idea of self-hosting the blog (on AWS or something), while still using an SSG of some kind. There could be some benefits with adding more dynamic content or having more autonomy over my site but not sure if it'd be worth additional costs or headache trying to manage.
Writing (or generally producing "content") has always been something I do out of pure enjoyment but I've considered trying to monetize in some way. What are some platform considerations if I wanted to monetize say, a podcast, newsletter, video courses, premium articles, etc...
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Other adjacent properties I'm looking to "re-design"...
My #podcast is currently hosted on #Podbean, which I have liked so far but I'd like to further embrace the Fediverse so have considered moving to #Castopod. Any advice on hosted vs. self-hosted? Are there other non-Castopod fediverse options?
As of right now, my presence in the Fediverse is mostly on infosec.exchange where I post stuff from my site. I've considered hosting my own instance of Mastodon (or something similar) to be my main account or even just as an official "shellsharks the site" account. I've seen accounts of people going down this path and ultimately bailing due to costs, time overhead, etc...
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If there are noticeable benefits to making any significant changes I'd be willing to take that on as a project for 2024. Otherwise, I might just stick with what I have and focus on writing/research =). Thanks so much to anyone who takes the time to read / respond!
I've been using a "static content generator" self-publishing web platform for over 5 years now, called "Jekyll". It's still holding up well to posting my video #Dhamma Talks (as well as photos, and the occasional longer-format essay), and I can host it inexpensively on a $5US/month VPS hosting plan.
#Jekyll is quite no-frills (still no dark mode in its default theme, called "Minima"):
...but on a day like today - where there is a lot of unrest and commotion around abandoning Substack - I'm glad to just let my content just sit mellow in one place.
#Selfhosting shines as having been worth it, when time and time again, some "too-good-to-be-true" platform doesn't remain a good option.
I'm playing around with #faircamp to maybe replace minimalistic band websites I've made in #jekyll. It's awesome and the output looks good. It's exactly the kind of thing I think needs to exist. The main limitation that makes it hard to completely replace jekyll with for my minimal purposes is the inability to make arbitrary pages. Maybe I can make it work with a blank release or something but it should be as simple as adding an about.md file and bam you got an /about page.
I've been thinking about porting my personal site over from Jekyll to Eleventy. The main thing stopping me is that my workflow with Jekyll works just fine for me, and I don't exactly write a lot on my site, so I don't know if it's worth it. Though having an excuse to noodle around with it for a while might be fun. Anyone have any thoughts? #jekyll#eleventy
So I guess I'm gonna do a blog? What's the hot blog framework these days? Ideally, blogposts would just be markdown files. No need (or desire) for a comment system. I don't want to install WordPress on another server.
I'm happy to build it from scratch but I figure this is a solved problem. Markdown preferred for Obsidian compatibility.
On my #Jekyll blogging platform, I've switched the base Docker image from #JRuby to raw #Ruby, added a JRE, removed the JavaScript environment and removed page minification.
Con: the image went from ~500Mb to ~800Mb
Pros: no more Java gems and build time from ~7s to ~2s
If you have a personal website: what platform, CMS, SSG, tech stack, or service are you using for it? Would you pick it again? How much technical expertise did it require to set up and make it your own? And do you have to do a lot of maintenance?
Once more – you guessed it – I’m asking for my #OwnYourWeb#newsletter subscribers. 😉
RT = 🎉
@matthiasott I did use #Jekyll on GitHub Pages for years, then switched to @eleventy last spring (https://blog.ltgt.net/from-jekyll-to-eleventy/), still hosted on #GitHubPages.
We picked #11ty for an internal website at work too.
I started from scratch but using a starter project should make it really easy to get started. Of course you have to know markdown and Git.
In terms of maintenance, well, I update from time to time but 11ty is so stable (from what I read) it doesn't require more than bumping the versions.
@matthiasott I am using #Jekyll and #GitHub Pages, I feel like it does not get any easier than that. Writing some #Markdown and create a template using #HTML and #CSS mostly covers it. I don't even have to think about the pipeline, since GitHub covers that as well.