Notes on shipping small static sites in 2026
Static sites are having a quiet renaissance. Not the kind that trends on Hacker News every six months, but the kind where people who just want a personal site keep reaching for the same small set of tools — and it mostly Just Works.
Why Jekyll, still
GitHub Pages builds Jekyll natively. That’s the whole pitch. No CI to configure, no Node toolchain to keep alive, no lockfile drama. You write Markdown, push to main, and a few seconds later the site is live.
There are faster builders (Hugo), prettier DX stories (Astro), and friendlier plugin ecosystems (11ty). All true. But for a personal blog — where the build runs once a week and nobody cares if it takes four seconds — the “zero moving parts” story is hard to beat.
The pieces that matter
A personal blog really only needs:
- A layout system so the header and footer don’t live in every file.
- A post list that reverses itself automatically.
- A tag system — optional, but nice to have.
- Dark mode — table stakes at this point.
Everything else is polish.
A dark-mode detail worth knowing
The one trap with dark mode is the flash of wrong theme on first paint. The fix is a small inline script in the <head> that applies data-theme before the CSS loads:
<script>
var stored = localStorage.getItem('theme');
var prefersDark = matchMedia('(prefers-color-scheme: dark)').matches;
document.documentElement.setAttribute(
'data-theme',
stored || (prefersDark ? 'dark' : 'light')
);
</script>
That’s it. Render-blocking, yes, but it’s 200 bytes and it saves you the eye-searing white flash every time someone with dark mode enabled lands on your site.
Closing thought
Boring tools for boring problems, fancy tools for fancy problems. A personal blog is a boring problem — and that’s a feature.