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 the list 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
blogr - CLI blogging tool. Includes TUI editor and previewer. Themes. Deploy via GitHub.
BSSG
Eleventy - Popular. Seems to be going through an ownership and name-change which may or may not be a good thing.
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.
Pelican - Support for reStructuredText and markdown. Good docs, plugins and themes. Example 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

CMS and Frameworks

Astro - Looks quite advanced. The Build a Blog tutorial looks like a good way to get started with a web framework.
HamsterCMS - Smol. Old school. Goes well with Web 1.0 Hosting.
Kirby - Gets a lot of love.
Next.js

Somewhere in the middle

kiki - I like the design philosophy around this one.
Pure Blog - Simple and clean interface and output. Customisable.

Others I've seen pop up a lot, but I haven't sunk my teeth into

Email

Pagecord - Publish blogs via email. So cool.

Hosting only

pages.casa - Smol web hosting.
public.monster - Drag and drop your HTML. Simple. Encourages 90s vibe.

Mainstream - booooorring

Blogger
Ghost
Medium
Squarespace
Substack
Wix
Wordpress