TL;DR: quality over quantity

Relatable post from Rachel Smith's digital garden.

Check the other posts out

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A working library is a Mandy Brown's blog about work, reading & technology.

The design is nice and clear, but the best part of that blog, IMO, is the writing style. The author knows their way in writing and made me search for meanings of words a lot. Another interesting part is that the author quotes books often and provides links to their own reviews of them along with relevant information, such as where you could buy it.

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In this blog post viskanv explores concepts he wishes he would have known when he was writing songs as a teen. A lot of these points could be easily applied to other fields, which makes it a good read for anybody doing creative work.

Check out the other posts of that author, they have been blogging a lot so there's much to see.

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Multilingual blog with guestbook and links pages as a little bonus.

The writing is chill and doesn't seem to be limited to a certain topic, which, IMO is good.

The whole website is neatly styled whilst at the same style sticking to the minimal design bearblog pushes.

So go ahead and check it out yourself :)

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Neocities.org is a social network and web hosting platform that aims to bring back the creativity and individual expression of the early days of the internet. It provides users with the ability to create their own websites using an easy-to-use HTML editor, either directly in their browser or by uploading files from their favorite desktop editor. Neocities allows users to browse and discover new sites through tags, similar to web rings, and follow their favorite sites to receive updates in their news feed. One notable feature of Neocities is that it does not display any advertising on its platform.

It was founded with the goal of recreating the spirit of Geocities and emphasizes the importance of web creativity and community interaction. Neocities has gained a significant user base, with over 627,900 web sites hosted on its platform.

A cool blog I found reviewing metal albums. The RSS feed is hidden for some reason, so in case you are got interested in the blog — here it is

Key things to know about Codeberg Pages for hosting a personal blog:

• Codeberg Pages is a free static site hosting service provided by Codeberg, which is an open source platform for hosting Git repos. It's similar to GitHub Pages but fully open source.
• It allows you to easily deploy static websites and blogs from a Git repository on Codeberg. Whenever you push code changes to your repo, Codeberg Pages will automatically rebuild and deploy your site.
• To get started, you need to create an account on Codeberg, then create a repository for your blog source code. Codeberg supports building sites from common static site generators like Jekyll, Hugo, Hexo etc. Refer to official documentation to get information on how to do that.
• Custom domain support is available, so you can use your own domain rather than codeberg.org subdomains.
• It doesn't have as much features as GitLab Pages or Github Pages but is nevertheless an option if you don't want to use proprietary services.
• It is community funded, that's why I wouldn't recommend using it unless you really want to ditch all proprietary platforms or you make donations to Codeberg regulary.

The activity has gone down so I thought it may be a good idea to do a little survey.

Do you feel like something is lacking in this community? Maybe there is some rule that you don't like? Should the community be focused on something else? Or are you lurking in this community because you are not very into the Indie Web and don't have anything to say?

I'm fond of the author's style of writing. His blogs rarely read slowly, he manages to keep the unnecessary stuff and has a big vocabulary so his sentences don't feel repetitive. This makes it an interesting read even for those who don't even care about Linux distributions.

The CSS of the blog is another strong point, words are big and easily readable even on small screens because they are what really matters.

barf, which stands for blogs are really fun is an exotic and minimal static site generator.

It is a very short bash script with only 101 lines of code, yet it achieves some impressive results. Here's the live demo and the dev's personal blog.

This is not what you want for your blog if seek features. barf is for people protesting against big site generators, for those who want simplicity and for people who know bash and might want to tweak it for their needs.

If you don't feel like going through the hassle of setting up a static site generator and finding a place to host it, then you can resort to blogging platforms.

It is a light platform with minimum style that gives you free hosting, free subdomain, free themes and only requires Markdown knowledge to get started blogging.

For a small fee you will be able to use a custom domain and upload images to your posts. With a custom domain and a backup of all your posts, you can ensure your blog wouldn't go anywhere if the owner of the platform goes rogue. Although that is very unlikely.

Check out the official documentation.

Another popular choice for hosting your indie blog.

GitLab provides repos for all the popular SSGs to fork to give you a quick start. There is also a tutorial to create a GitLab Pages site from scratch.

Your SSG might provide a guide for hosting on GitLab Pages too:

• Hugo
• Hexo

Now that we know of some SSGs from my previous posts, it's time to think where should we actually host out website.

Probably the most popular option is GitHub Pages, which allows you to host static sites from your GitHub repository for absolutely free.

Here are some guides how to use GH Pages with popular static site generators:

• Jekyll
• Hugo
• Hexo
• 11y

Other SSGs likely have guides for GH Pages too since it's so popular and provides GitHub Actions to public repositories for free.

Please share what you think about this service in the comments section.

Yet another SSG, the simplest one of everything I have shared yet. Quite a few big companies use it for their websites and I think just this fact says a lot about the tool.

It has a standard set of features every SSG should have in 2023. The docs are very small though and the project's website recommends watching YouTube video tutorials to get a better grasp of the tool.

Share what you think in the comments and please share your experience with Eleventy, it will be super helpful for people choosing a static site generator for their website!

Hexo advertises itself as

A fast, simple & powerful blog framework

I haven't tried it myself, so I can't judge whether it is fast, but from what I've read in the Docs section it really is simple.

Similary to Metalsmith, it is installed using npm and is really extensible, although, it seems, to a lesser extent.

It supports internationalisation, has ~390 community themes, generates RSS feeds, supports multiple syntaxes for writing blog posts. In short, everything you need from an SSG.

The docs provide answers to most questions one might have and devs are kind enough to suggest opening an issue on Github if you don't see a solution to something there.

Share your thoughts in the comments. It's extra appreciated if you have been using Hexo for a while and can provide useful feedback for others to consider when choosing a static site generator.

Continuing my series of tool posts, today is Metalsmith's turn.

It piggybacks on Node's infrastructure (npm in particular) and advertises itself as being pluggable. The core is minimal, allowing it to become more than just a static site generator with relevant plugins.

Starting with it should be no harder than with some other SSG's like Hugo. The docs even provide some starter projects and a Netlify template for one-click deploy.

Share what you think about it and your personal experience with this tool in the comments.

So I thought about moving from posting links to blogs for a while and do a series of tool posts and then make something like a megathread for weblogging.

Today we start with Hugo, a fast and simple static site generator used by a ton of people. It has quite a few themes to choose from and is relatively simple to get started with. Judging from my own experience, you can go from absolute 0 with Hugo to having a site with most needed configuration in the course of one evening. It has documentation for a lot of things, for example how to automate deployment of your website to GH pages. At the same time, Hugo is definitely not minimalistic, its set of features is enough to satisfy most people.

Post your thoughts on it and experience with it in the comments, to help people grasp better what they will be dealing with if they chose Hugo.