ABabhgh·Feb 7, 2024
Like many others here I'm going to recommend Jekyll too, and I recently started blogging with it [1]. Although the primary reason to suggest Jekyll would be that its non-nonsense and has been around a while (which is what the other comments mention), I would also like to add that when I needed customizations it was easy to Google for them because of the large community. Going in I believed that no platform will match all my needs, so I needed something where minor customizations wouldn't demand a steep learning curve. Some specific examples that I was able to solve with some basic searching:
[1] On the homepage [a] I needed some excerpts from the post to appear underneath the title. I also wanted this excerpt to show up in the RSS feed.
[2] Since I think of my posts as live documents - if I remember a new detail, I add it to my posts, bec
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ause more than anything else my blog is notes for me -I also wanted to add a "Last major update" date to my posts - you can see this appear over the titles (the date after '||') and at the top of individual articles. I wanted this to be manual because I didn't want this date to change because I fixed a typo etc.
[3] Since I'm interested in technical articles, I wanted a good way to cite papers. I use jekyll scholar [b] for the purpose, and if you look at the last 2 articles on my blog you'll see the outcomes it produces.
[4] I also wanted my article URLs to be concise instead of the jekyll default which has year, month, day as part of it - this was a fairly easy change to make as well.
[5] Linking to a different section in an article or a section in another article without using the public URL (because this might change if for some reason I end up with a different namespace tomorrow) - this is also possible using variables, whose values get (re-)generated every time you change the document markdown.
[6] Before I push the article to github I usually have it served for a while (typically a few days) on a local server on my laptop (you don't have to install a separate server - the jekyll build system bundles one, this is how you locally see what the article would look like) which I proof-check from different devices while in the house, e.g., from my mobile when I'm not at my desk. Its convenient.
[7] Of course, support for MathJax.
[8] Lot's of themes to pick from. For ex. Al-Folio [c] is a minimalist theme that seems to be becoming popular for academic writing.
I'm sure some of the other solutions do most of these, but I wanted to draw your attention to the ease of customizability.
[a] https://blog.quipu-strands.com/
[b] https://github.com/inukshuk/jekyll-scholar
[c] https://github.com/alshedivat/al-folio?tab=readme-ov-file