Selfhosted

I use Hugo and I've been pretty happy with it. It has a lot of layout templates you can use out of the box so you don't need to learn a new templating language unless you want to do customizations. I write blogs in markdown and it's automatically rendered and published.

Zola. Similar to Hugo, but newer and written in Rust.

https://www.getzola.org/

https://getpublii.com/

It's a GUI app that runs on your local system and pushes sites to a server.

I think you might like hugo

It's what I use for my blog

This might be what you're looking for: Zola

Single binary that lets you keep your markdown/config in git and just build it from the git clone folder you're in at the time.

I know some people that have moved off of Hugo to this, and Alex from the Selfhosted podcast recently talked about it on their show.

Use Publii, it has a WYSIWYG editor, a block editor and a markdown editor. It creates the files on your PC and can upload it to your server. Just point your webserver to the uploaded folder.

Very beginner friendly ☝🏻

I found pelican to be quite simple to start with and depending on how deep you want to go it can be quite customizable. Being proficient in python helps.

I like using Hugo at present

I think mkdocs is easier than hugo but less flexible in terms of capability. However it serves all my needs (list of webpages accessible from a central frontpage)

In case you're familiar with Obsidian, there's Quartz: quartz.jzhao.xyz/ Runs in docker too, practically zero config to start

Have you checked out grav https://learn.getgrav.org/17/basics/what-is-grav

https://github.com/getgrav/grav

I use it just to make simple markdown sites for info like my gaming servers or if I feel like making a random blog post

I did try setting up 11ty, despite my misgivings over node.js. Using Markdown went OK, except it wouldn't render explicit tag parameters to allow me to do one-off formatting.

I'm looking for something similar that I can host in blue host, but all there is, apparently, is WordPress (hell no), joomla and drupal, and these are certainly not static.

My preference is Nikola.

Relevant comment chain: https://programming.dev/comment/12187727

Docusaurus. It's all markdown.

Codeberg Pages if you don't mind a give-or-take weekly 30 min downtime. GitHub Pages if you do. GitLab Pages if you have a creditcard which they require to verify your identity.

https://www.sphinx-doc.org/ + https://pradyunsg.me/furo/ theme + https://myst-parser.readthedocs.io/ markdown parser + https://sphinx-design.readthedocs.io/ extensions.

Just drop all your markdown files in a directory and run sphinx-build. Highly customizable but also works out of the box

I want to second Pelican for Python. Really easy to set up and get going. No need to learn a complicated templating language (it's jinja2, which is what everything uses).