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

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

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)

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.

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

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

Quartz or mkdocs

My preference is Nikola.

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.

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).