[thomasahle]

Has anyone done statistics on what generators / platforms people use? I currently use a mix / roll my own, but I'd love recommendations for a good setup.

In particular the features I'm after are: (1) Latex support for equations, (2) Support for code snippets, (3) Support for my own custom D3 or other javascript widgets.

[epiccoleman]

I rolled my own for my current blog (at epiccoleman.com). I wrote a post about it, which honestly isn't that interesting, since it basically just amounts to writing posts in regular old html.

I did use Tailwind for styling, mostly because I was interested in learning more about it.

I use PrismJS for styling code blocks, and it works very well. No complaints there.

The thing I like about "just use HTML" is that it ultimately affords a ton of flexibility if I ever want to embed some interesting layout or little JavaScript demo. A good example of this is this explainer section from a post I wrote about SVG. I'm proud of how this turned out and it wouldn't have been possible to make it look as good as it does without just manually writing the markup (scroll to "Understanding SVG", I don't think I put an anchor on the heading unfortunately):

https://epiccoleman.com/posts/2023-04-05-svg-circle-of-fifth...

I have another post about the "tech stack" here if you're interested: https://epiccoleman.com/posts/2023-03-07-how-i-built-this-si...

[steve_adams_86]

You and I want the same thing! I’m sad to say I haven’t found that yet. I’ve been considering rolling my own but I feel like so many similar things exist, there must be something out there already…

One thing I did start building is sort of like a rudimentary code sandbox that’s geared towards running code inline to to explain concepts. I tried using existing solutions, but none really do what I’m thinking of. What might be ideal is something like observable.hq with the code and results visible. I’d like to show the DOM, console, or even both, along with the supporting code.

Anyway, that’s a while off because it’s not trivial. Sometimes I’m surprised there isn’t something obviously suitable for this and I must be missing something, but everything I’ve found so far really misses the mark.

One thing that kills me is that I want these widgets to live as long as my writing does. So many 3rd party tools could be gone next week; I can’t waste time throwing examples in there if it’ll just wind up MIA without warning.

[komali2]

Honestly I've found that if all I want is text, images, latex, code snippets, and maybe a tiny bit of javascript, then Hugo or maybe Jekyll with static deploys to some normal ass webserver is the most consistently easy and maintainable. Beyond that just straight up HTML files.

I've had too many blog services close on me, too many frameworks go stale and require inordinate amounts of time to update, too many deploy strategies deprecate some aspect I depended on, to want to go through all that for whatever bells and whistles I get for doing the extra effort.

My blog is just hugo https://github.com/komali2/blog

and my co-op's blog is just a folder of html files in our website directory lol https://github.com/508-dev/508.dev/tree/main/src/blog