I wanted to build a quick website and explored various options.
- First came Google sites, which is good, but needed dedicated time to maintain — dropped!
- Then came Jekyll and Bootstrap template based sites, and I really liked some of those free ones, with 1-click option to start, like this one. But again, needed dedicated time and some extra skills on web design side — dropped!
- Blog-based site builders like FastPages, Codelabs, which I am already using and loves a lot, are mainly blogs per se, but I needed a proper site structure and a bit more flexibility on design — dropped!
- Documentation based sites like Sphinx, MkDocs are good contenders. Super cool and close to what I want, especially MkDocs like this one. These are close to what I want, but again requires some dedicated time. For example, to add a new post or page, I have to dedicate at least 5 mins on average which sounds small but 10-mins to get into the zone and 10-mins out, and I lost a whole pomodoro — dropped!
- I use notion heavily and it offers a single-click sharing facility , I think this is exactly what I want. But the page addresses’ are too long and speed, too slow. So explored some tools like super.so and notion2site. Great tools but pricey — dropped!
- And lastly, explored some free variants of these tools like notablog and loconotion. Both are equally good. In this part, let’s focus on notablog, will cover loconotion site later.
- I wrote a colab to add my google analytics tag, modify some bits here and there and voila, I can convert all my backend into frontend without any effort. But still one challenge, requires a python environment and have to run the whole notebook/colab every time I want to update.
- To solve it, I created a simple wrapper on top of notablog, basically automated it with GitHub actions so that all I have to do now is to trigger the git action and the it re-builds the whole site in ~30 secs. I make this a git template, so that any new site can now be created end-to-end in 5–10 mins. And maintaining it is super easy, you know like a breeze!
Here is the link. You will soon find a video and codelab tutorial also on README page.