Website creation

I've been messing with command line website creation tools.

Specifically with HUGO and 11TY.

Hugo

This has the name to be easier for the non-tech nerds. It offers lots of options, all documented on the website, and it looks very promising.

Downer for me: I couldn't get it to work. After following the install instructions from the Hugo site, the sample didn't work. After discovering there was (and is) an error on it, I couldn't get it to work either. I have no idea why not, but that failed gloriously, so exit Hugo.

11ty

11ty seems to be a bit more complicated. Contrary to Hugo, I got this to work, and that wasn't even difficult.

Bummer: the default creates subdirectories with the name of each post and writes an index.html file in there. My current sites have HTML pages with the content, all in the root dir of the public dir of where they're hosted.

I tried to find a way to port 11ty to do that. It seems possible, with data files and directives and such, but after 2 days of searching, I haven't found it. 10 years ago I would have gone on and asked around, to get this to work.

Publii

But this is not 10 years ago, this is today. I've decided to stick with Publii, which this post is created in. It does an excellent job, and has plenty of options to theme and customise things, and I can fiddle with PHP code inside code-blocks when I don't use the WYSIWYG editor for a page that needs it. An example is the "new book announcement page" on my Author site.

Publii does what I want, in a friendly package, and it can update the site through various ways, automatically uploading only what has been changed. Simplicity rules.

And before you say, "but Hugo and 11ty are open source programs!"

So is Publii. Their code is on github.