I want something that is:
- SSG (static site output)
- looks nice
- is a template I can use out of the box by just dropping in my content and configurations, rather than designing or building myself
- is not feature-poor. I want it to have features like footnotes, jump-to-section links, citations, on-hover pop-ups for citations or footnotes, syntax highlighting for code blocks, etc.
- nice to have: ability to draw basic graphs or diagrams (helps in technical explanations)
- is not too difficult to customize by editing the code directly, Customizing the looks, structure, or adding functionality if I needed
Programming language doesn’t matter much. I can use whatever. I do have a preference for functional languages.
Eleventy seems like a great framework to do this, but as I said I want a template that’s ready out of the box not just a framework. The blogging template I found for eleventy does not look as nice as I hope.
+1… Started using Zola and built on top of it to learn scss, javascript, and HTML. All that extra building was not required for a running site but was still a great learning experience.
I also enjoyed Zola. Ended up switching off of it, but I think it’s a great way to directly jump into writing content. The only reason I switched off was because I wanted more control than it would provide, but for most cases, I think it’s completely fine.