Static Sites and Generators

Static Sites Enable a Good Time Travel Experience

https://hamatti.org/posts/static-sites-enable-a-good-time-travel-experience/ https://preslav.me/2025/09/04/every-commit-is-a-time-machine/

my solution makes time travel to (almost) any given moment in time a two-command operation (git checkout with the right commit hash and @11ty/eleventy serve to serve a dev server).

This is one of the many reasons to use Hugo.

Do not depend on Saas products. You want to see your site as it was in 2011? Good luck finding that old snapshot on the Wayback Machine, if it even exists. Even if you do, it will likely be a patchwork of missing images, broken links, and outdated plugins.

with static sites and git, you don’t have to pray to the SaaS gods or dig through some arcane database. Two commands - git checkout and your dev server. And you are staring at your site as it was.

Jamstack

https://jamstack.org/

Pure GitHub approach for maintaining the personal wiki

Maintaining personal-wiki org files in just a GitHub repository:

Advantages

1. Search capability for content from the pages.

Disadvantages

1. Navigation between the links is not good. The links in a page are not clickable/navigatable. They are not hyperlinks. So the primary advantage with linking pages is lost when looking at them in GitHub.

GitHub pages

https://pages.github.com/

Disadvantages

1. The GitHub repository has to be public and the published github.io page will also be public.
2. We have to use the template that comes with it. Limits our choices when it comes to customization.

mdBook

https://rust-lang.github.io/mdBook/index.html

cargo install mdbook

mdbook init finance-notes

mdbook serve --open

We need to copy the markdown into src folder and update Summary.md file for them to show up in the website.

1. Uses Rust
2. Haven’t tried it personally

Next.js for static websites

org-mode + org-roam + Hugo + GitLabs

org-mode + org-roam + Hugo + Hugo themes + github/gitlab

org-mode + org-roam + quartz + gitlab/github

jekyll

Off to a bad start

Tried to follow the instructions from this page: https://jekyllrb.com/docs/

First, nothing would run without adding ruby to the path like this:

export PATH=/home/explorer436/.local/share/gem/ruby/3.3.0/bin:$PATH

After that, I tried running the command to set-up a jeckyl site and I ran into This error:

[explorer436@explorer436-p50-20eqs27p03 temp]$ jekyll new myblog
<internal:/usr/lib/ruby/3.3.0/rubygems/core_ext/kernel_require.rb>:136:in `require': cannot load such file -- erb (LoadError)
Did you mean?  drb
        from <internal:/usr/lib/ruby/3.3.0/rubygems/core_ext/kernel_require.rb>:136:in `require'
        from /home/explorer436/.local/share/gem/ruby/3.3.0/gems/jekyll-4.4.1/lib/jekyll/commands/new.rb:3:in `<top (required)>'
        from <internal:/usr/lib/ruby/3.3.0/rubygems/core_ext/kernel_require.rb>:136:in `require'
        from <internal:/usr/lib/ruby/3.3.0/rubygems/core_ext/kernel_require.rb>:136:in `require'
        from /home/explorer436/.local/share/gem/ruby/3.3.0/gems/jekyll-4.4.1/lib/jekyll.rb:13:in `block in require_all'
        from /home/explorer436/.local/share/gem/ruby/3.3.0/gems/jekyll-4.4.1/lib/jekyll.rb:12:in `each'
        from /home/explorer436/.local/share/gem/ruby/3.3.0/gems/jekyll-4.4.1/lib/jekyll.rb:12:in `require_all'
        from /home/explorer436/.local/share/gem/ruby/3.3.0/gems/jekyll-4.4.1/lib/jekyll.rb:188:in `<top (required)>'
        from <internal:/usr/lib/ruby/3.3.0/rubygems/core_ext/kernel_require.rb>:136:in `require'
        from <internal:/usr/lib/ruby/3.3.0/rubygems/core_ext/kernel_require.rb>:136:in `require'
        from /home/explorer436/.local/share/gem/ruby/3.3.0/gems/jekyll-4.4.1/exe/jekyll:8:in `<top (required)>'
        from /home/explorer436/.local/share/gem/ruby/3.3.0/bin/jekyll:25:in `load'
        from /home/explorer436/.local/share/gem/ruby/3.3.0/bin/jekyll:25:in `<main>'

Didn’t spend any more time on it after that.

Other tools that looked interesting but I haven’t tried

1. Eleventy (11ty)
   1. https://cloudcannon.com/blog/eleventy-11ty-vs-hugo/

Some sample documentation pages for inspiration

1. https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/tour/
2. https://handbook.gitlab.com/

Sites made with Hugo

1. https://handbook.gitlab.com/
2. http://digital.gov/
3. https://vote.gov/
4. http://godottutorials.com/

Sites made with Eleventy

1. https://matthogg.fyi/
2. https://v8.dev/
3. http://web.dev/
4. http://developer.chrome.com/
5. https://cloudcannon.com/

Tags

1. Steps for building content folder from org files using org-roam
2. Hugo themes and customizations