Nikola VS WriteFreely

Nikola is a feature-rich static site generator that supports a variety of formats for content creation, including reStructuredText, Markdown, and Jupyter Notebooks. It offers a flexible architecture, allowing you to use different template engines and supports plugins for extending functionality. Nikola is suitable for both simple blogs and complex websites.

You can - you'd basically just create a python script that parses your HTML/CSS files and replaces strings with values from your YAML. However I wouldn't recommend that unless you're just using this as an opportunity to learn Python. If you want to standup a real site and you want to use python, I'd recommend a Python static site generator like Pelican or Nikola.

I tend to prefer static site generators for this kind of use case. I use Nikola, which is written in and based on Python. You should be able to pick whatever html5up template you like and turn it into a Nikola template, too.

I switched to Nikola recently: https://getnikola.com/

Reads every kind of plaintext format, but will also just publish a Jupyter notebook which means you can do drag and drop image and graph inlining which makes everything so much simpler (and thus makes me more likely to keep it up).

I've been using Nikola and am happy with it: https://github.com/getnikola/nikola

Might be this static site generator: https://getnikola.com/

Found it by searching [nikola software].

I know you say you're comfortable with your workflow, but just wanted to throw out that if you're not dependent on Jekyll, and are simply looking for the best way to create a static site/blog from org-mode files, you could consider Nikola as an alternative. It has an excellent org-mode plugin which would likely solve your complication.

I also know that there is also Python-based Lektor [2], however I found Nikola more intriguing than this one.

[0] https://getnikola.com/

Mastodon is a microblogging service, so not meant for large bodies of text. This is why the text entry box is small, the columns are somewhat narrow (especially in deck mode) etc.

Platforms like https://writefreely.org/ , which are designed to be for blogging and long-form writing, are the place to write this. Write Freely federates so one can follow accounts and interact with posts via Mastodon etc.

Write Freely, open source writing space

Docs - https://writefreely.org/

It's all about federation, in these federated networks all these servers talk to eachother and exchange messages about stuff going on on the servers. So it's easy to set up a hidden service for the webui of one of them, but it's sometimes quite obscure to try and set up the federation for one of them. It depends on what settings they honor and what other types of encryption and authentication they require and stuff. But, if you put some effort in ahead of time, you can make it really simple: I don't know how to do it in rust(lemmy is written in rust), but here's a neat example of how to do it in Go: https://github.com/writefreely/writefreely/pull/710 which requires no complicated configuration.

An alternative to Plume is WriteFreely, which is a pretty clean & simple experience. Just don't expect to much regarding customization.

I also wish write.as were more popular. It's like old Medium, but less popular but with a more reader-friendly business model and self-host-able (AGPL v3)

And since you've mentioned you want to write a blog, take a look at WriteFreely: https://writefreely.org/