Website and blog building tools
2025-10-15 20:44
I felt like making a list of these tools I keep coming across. I never finish what I start, so I'll just keep adding to this when I find new ones, or have something to say about a tool I've tried. There is seriously so much out there. It was fun revisiting some of these as I made the list.
Plain HTML
- Plain HTML - Best way to learn. You'll need a host. The Odin Project's Foundation Course is an incredibly good primer (not just for HTML, but for CSS, text-editors and Git as well).
- HTML Journal - Format your HTML this way, host it, and get posts fed into the Neon Kiosk (HTML Journal aggregator).
Easy
- Bear Blog - Popular blogging community. Customisable. Has a discover feed.
- Micro.blog - Customisable. How I got started tinkering with CSS. Browser and native apps.
- omg.lol - Another I've seen popular with fediversians.
- smol.pub - Simple web interface. Customisable CSS. Posts to HTML. Cross-posts to Gemini and Gopher protocols.
- Pika - Very quick and easy. Post from browser. Themes.
Static Site Generators
- BashWrite - CLI. Default theme looks fine.
- bckt
- BSSG
- Eleventy - Popular.
- Gozer
- Hugo - Popular. Breaks a lot of sites on version updates.
- Jekyll - Popular.
- manpageblog
- mdsite
- MkDocs - Give it some extra oomph with Material for MkDocs. Using for my notes site.
- prose.sh - Hacky, CLI. Has a discovery page
- Quartz - Used to use this with an Obsidian vault. Was a fun little tool. It still has that compatibility, but is fine as a standalone SSG.
- Zine
- Zola - What I currently use.
- Zoner
Others I've seen pop up a lot, but I haven't sunk my teeth into
Frameworks
- HamsterCMS - Smol. Old school. Goes well with Web 1.0 Hosting.
- Kirby - Gets a lot of love.
CMS
- Astro - Looks quite advanced. The Build a Blog tutorial looks like a good way to get started with a web framework.
- Next.js
- Pagecord - Publish blogs via email. So cool.
Mainstream
- Blogger
- Ghost
- Medium
- Squarespace
- Substack
- Wix
- Wordpress