this post was submitted on 21 May 2025
86 points (96.7% liked)

Selfhosted

60426 readers
208 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

Detailed Rules Post

  1. Be civil.

  2. No spam.

  3. Posts are to be related to self-hosting.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or readme if you're providing a link.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title.

  6. No trolling.

  7. Promotion posts require active participation, with an account that is at least 30 days old. F/LOSS without a paywall has exceptions, with requirements. See the rules link for details.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I ran my own blog for many years but recently I suspect my server got hacked, and after reinstalling I want to do things a little differently.

I'd like to move away from PHP and I don't really need a dynamic CMS anyhow.

So far I've been using PicoCMS which serves content from markdown pages with a little header. I got quite good at it, wrote my own theme and a few plugins. The templating language is Twig so something similar would be a boon for me.

Writing content in markdown is my most important requirement, or rather reusing the existing pages with as little massaging as possible. Here is one example:

***
Title: Create WiFi Hotspot with NetworkManager
date: 24.11.2022
Tags: archlinux,android
template: post
***

# Make sure required depenencies are installed

blablablablablablablabla

I really want a tag cloud, which used to be my only sorting mechanism apart from date. Most generators, at first glance, offer a tags page. Honestly I have no idea if I'd have to template the cloud myself but tag functionality seems to be common, I guess?

What I don't want is any sort of web UI or even builtin server functionality or other bells and whistles for the user. I prefer to ssh into the server and do things on the CLI.

Now my most important constraint is that I want to use what's available in (or as a) Debian repositories. After a quick search around it boils down to:

Searching for similar topics I found this and this. I read all the comments.

TIA


edit: Lots of people mention Hugo. Why would I choose that over, say, Jekyll or Pelican?
Personally I feel drawn more towards Python than Go or Rust, and a Twig-like (e.g. Jinja) templating language. If that's idiotic, please let me know why.
Also please remember I'm not running a github (or other similar VCS) page but have a dedicated VPS running Debian Stable. Deployment or containerization are of no interest to me.


edit2: For now I have settled on Pelican - both frontmatter and templating feel very familiar to me. I might even be able to port my PicoCMS theme over. I have not tried to install plugins via pip yet.

Thanks to all!


In the end I chose Pelican soon after this and have been using it happily ever since.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] monoboy@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 year ago

I use Zola too. I chose it because it is like a simpler version of Hugo and it has a much easier templating engine (it's similar to Jinja2).