A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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It might be overkill, but my website xylight.dev is written in Svelte with the framework Sveltekit. I use the adapter-static and disabled the client JavaScript with export const csr = false in my +layout.ts.
I really like Svelte since it lets me write reusable components really quickly, with very native feeling markup that, once I prerender it, expands into normal HTML.
You could just do it manually. Write the HTML an CSS.
Now there's a radical idea. Might actually do this xD
You don't even need to learn HTML to do it. Any word processor will 'save as HTML,' but the markup should be straightforward enough for anyone considering selfhosting. CSS can be a real rabbit hole, but browser default styles aren't awful.
I don't think there is really any learning curve to "learning HTML" if you are not trying to do anything funky and you just want a simple static website that functions, like OP said, "like a business card". You may as well just type it out yourself. If you've never written HTML before just look at w3schools.
+1!!
I found this guide very inspiring: https://melonking.net/thoughts/lets-make
It focuses on the creativity and self-creation aspect of writing your own websites. The site is quirky but also geniune.
This is so cool, thanks for sharing! I'm really excited about the "indie web", being a network of expressive people being people rather than just a giant commerce machine.
This is the only correct answer in this entire thread.
Personally, after churning through all the static site generator options, I landed on Jekyll, one of the first of them. It's definitely not the sexiest solution, but it's Markdown-in and HTML-out (my main page is still raw HTML/CSS from like twenty years ago, though), was the easiest for me to match the styling that I wanted from the base theme, and it's been along for long enough that it's mostly surprise-free.
That said, if you only want the equivalent of a business card, I might argue that setting up anything is probably overkill, all overhead for just a tiny bit of content. In that case, you can grab some modern-ish HTML boilerplate like this one, then use Pandoc to convert the Markdown (which you presumably already know if you're messing with Hugo) to the HTML that goes between <body> and </body> in the boilerplate. Add CSS, and you're done.
Oh, and actually, depending on how broadly you want just the "business card" idea, something like Littlelink might also fit your needs, where you hack out the links that you don't care about and fill in destinations for the rest.
+1 for just using html & css if it's literally just an online business card (I'm sure theres millions of themes you can easily modify the source of and there won't be updates to work around).
A generator is only really useful if you have blog posts, multiple pages, something that changes often, etc, right?
That's close to how I think about it, yeah, but I'd push more in terms of the investment. Since Jekyll, Hugo, Svelte, Eleventy, and the rest just generate flat HTML to upload, there's nothing wrong with using it for a single page. But you end up needing to learn the whole build-and-deploy process and all the layout quirks, which (especially if you're starting from scratch) will take longer to get the page out. And like you point out, the more material you have, the better that investment looks.
But then, if you already know the system, there's no new investment, so it becomes more of a toss-up whether to build things that way, since a page of Markdown is slightly faster to write than the equivalent HTML.
I suggest one of the many wonderful one-page templates available on GitHub, Codeberg, et. al. GitHub has a whole topic on them at https://github.com/topics/single-page-site. You pick one that matches your requirements and that looks good to you, change the text, and serve.
Ghost Blog. Open source, flexible, loads of potential uses, works every time.
I like to use bootstrap studio for website design.
Another tool, not sure it will fit your needs exactly, called reactive resume. Might be able to use it as a business card.
Create a custom hugo template that you can maintain yourself however and whenever.
I know its old and unmaintained, but I really like picoCMS. its just a markdown to HTML site thing, but I cant find any replacement
According to their GitHub https://getgrav.org/ is an "excellent alternative".
yes, but no.
All the alternatives I have looked at had a re-setup tax that I didnt want to get into, also none of them had the easy editing that pico has. you just point it at a collection of markdown files and you get a site out.
My HTML/CSS skillset is abysmal, so I went with Hugo and deployed the repository onto cloudflare. It was up in minutes.
Have fun picking through the many options, haha. I just figured out Ghost (open source blogging platform) but it can easily be edited with static pages. It is basic but I am okay with the functionalities and ease of use
I wrote my own set of tools in python that convert a simple gemtext formatted .gmi file into a static HTML file thats served by apache.
I'm a big fan of the Gemini Protocol project and found that handwriting pages in gemtext was ideal for focusing on text content and not worrying about formatting. Converting it to HTML+CSS with some scripts is pretty easy.
If anyone's interested I can give a link, currently just hosting source locally on my website, really should get a public github running.
People are going to hate this, but AI is perfect for this. You can literally just ask it to make whatever you want the website to look like in natural language and it will give you the code and generate a html page for you to preview.
I was in a similar boat. Wanted a simple static site generator with little to no config. I found https://github.com/rochacbruno/marmite and am happy with it
If you know some Python, I'd look at Flask. It might be overkill for a static site but it'll leave the door open for future expansion. If your goal is minimal effort, this is probably not the way to go.
Write markdown and convert to HTML with pandoc?
I found BashWrite which is just a very simple static site generator written completely in bash as a single file script.
The only dependency is having an up-to-date sed command which most systems should have. I use Alpine Linux which comes with a minimal sed command so I had to download the full command through my package manager.
It's simple, basic and has support for the majority of markdown formatting. There's some limitations due to it being written in Bash only but I am personally okay with that.
I found it on this list of static site generators if you're curious to see more options.
I might get shit for this, but I used ChatGPT to generate the code for a basic, single page, html/css, static website.
Ryan you might as well recommend a Macbook as a Linux alternative
Screech all you want, Copilot. It'll take 10 minutes to get an MVP and you can just tweak from there.