If you saw my website in early 2023, then you’ll notice it currently looks a lot
different. When setting up this site it was my goal to have it be pretty low
maintenance and at the same time have the ability to add custom material if I
needed to. In modern web development, there are many options but the most
important thing to do is to pick out the correct class of options. Javascript
frameworks seem overkill for what I am trying to accomplish here, and I don’t
like being locked into certain software platforms like Wordpress and the like.
For this reason I settled on a static site generator.
The early version of my site was made using a Python static site generator
named Pelican. I had some prior experience with jinja2 (the rendering engine used in pelican) and a ton of experience with python development. This combined with many plugin options made pelican look like a good choice, since I wanted to have things like MathJax.
The new version of my site is now powered by the static generator Hexo. This is mostly because it looks easier to manage in terms of plugins, themes, adding new content without much configuration. Since I don’t modify my website with tremendous frequency, I think Hexo will be easier to come back to after a longer period of time.