Lists / reviews to find alternative tech

Static Site Generators (SSGs)

The content + Goal functionality for creating interactive scientific websites in markdown is one major category of comparisons:

• Hugo is a very popular Go-based instance of this, but it doesn't do anything interactive directly (todo: examine more if some kind of plugin stuff has been implemented?) Also they refuse to implement wikilink syntax: [[page]] which is a major problem -- their linking and templating stuff, while powerful, is kind of a mess, and all the HTML/CSS stuff is kinda horrible to deal with (same simplicity / flexibility tradeoff).

• https://github.com/myles/awesome-static-generators -- lots of links in there.

Curvenote

• https://curvenote.com/ -- no pricing listed on main website but -old page shows standard freemium deal: https://curvenote.com/pricing-old
• Nature review: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02577-1
• Uses Binder to host Jupyter notebooks on a server -- https://jupyterhub.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ -- https://mybinder.readthedocs.io/en/latest/about/user-guidelines.html -- mybinder is free but with limited compute and ram available, max 100.

Major advantage of Cogent framework: no server required!!!

The bottom line is that anything based on Jupyter is going to require a server, and a docker container to deal with all the random and complex dependency issues.

Nice features in curvenote:

• mouse hover shows preview of figures or references, etc - that would be nice.