Metalsmith VS Hexo

Metalsmith — the best customizable SSG

I use Metalsmith. Been happy with it. I build my site into a self-contained nginx docker image.

const Metalsmith = require('metalsmith') const markdown = require('@metalsmith/markdown') const layouts = require('metalsmith-layouts') const permalinks = require('@metalsmith/permalinks') const collections = require('metalsmith-collections') Metalsmith(__dirname) .metadata({ sitename: 'Website Name', description: "Website description.", generator: 'Metalsmith', url: 'https://metalsmith.io/' }) .source('./src') .destination('./build') // .clean(true) .use( collections({ projects: 'pages/*.md', reverse: true, refer: true }) ) .use(markdown()) .use(permalinks()) .use( layouts({ engineOptions: { helpers: { formattedDate: function (date) { return new Date(date).toLocaleDateString() } } } }) ) .build(function (err, files) { if (err) throw err })

I also started to move to hugo, but they didn't merge the pr [2] which would have helped in the transition. :(

The look is still similar to what it was in the beginning, in terms of colors at least.

[1] https://github.com/metalsmith/metalsmith

Metalsmith

A static site generator I've been enjoying lately (and using for my blog) is Metalsmith: https://metalsmith.io/

It feel like it's the best of both worlds, because it's simple to learn and customize, but there are plugins for the things you don't want to spend time writing yourself.

For example, I'm using plugins to: check for broken links, generate an RSS feed, and run a test server with automatic reloading.

But then I was able to easily add in my own code to handle relative links, generate Graphviz diagrams, and format dates.

One other recommendation: I hated almost every template language I ran across (Hugo's, Liquid, Nunjucks, EJS), but I'm thrilled with the simplicity of Handlebars (https://handlebarsjs.com/), although it is a bit limiting and the "block helper with parameters" syntax is strange (perhaps an indicator that I'm trying to do too much in the templating language!).

I believe Metalsmith [1] is trying that approach

[1] https://metalsmith.io/

A lot of great suggestions here and some stuff I’ve never heard of before!

Throwing my own suggestion into the ring, as I was just looking into this last week.

I started setting up a blog using Hexo. It’s another Node based SSG that uses markdown and supports tags. It has a lot of neat plugins that people have developed, too.

I like it so far!

https://github.com/hexojs/hexo

In my case, the latter is not possible because this blog is a static site, generated via Hexo and hosted on GitHub. It simply lacks a modifiable active server component.

Hexo — best lightweight SSG

Previously I've used Nuxt2 and even sooner - hexo.io

To make their creation easier, numerous open-source static websites generators are available: Jekyll, Hugo, Gatsby, Hexo, etc. Most of the time, the content is managed through static (ideally Markdown) files or a Content API. Then, the generator requests the content, injects it in templates defined by the developer and generates a bunch of HTML files.

https://gohugo.io/ written in go, support md https://hexo.io/ written in node

Hexo's

I'm currently using Hexo, I write articles in markdown, commit them to a git repository and push them to Github. I then have a Github Action to bundle the static website and publish it on Github Pages, so I get free hosting 👌

There are also many alternatives for selecting Static-Side Generating blog framework such as Hexo, Gatsby, Next.js (more details here). We will pick Hexo as our framework because it is a fast, simple & powerful blog framework.

Some alternatives I'm considering learning instead of Gatsby are Jeckyll or Hexo.