Update: I’ve found another (better) solution. See my post about eleventy

Backstory

Currently I’m moving a lot of sites from my server hosted on DigitalOcean to Netlify to save me time maintaining Linux servers. 😅

Therefore I needed to migrate a page which was previously rendered by caddy on the file to a page I can render with Netlify. But I didn’t want to take out the big guns like Hugo because it is only one page with like two sentences on it.

Strapdown to the resuce 💪

To be honest I search a little bit longer for this solution than I would have liked and I probably would have set up Hugo in that time, but anyway I found Strapdown! It is a Bootstrap theme which bundles a Javascript markdown converter.

This is what your index.html could look like to get a fully functional site which renders markdown on the fly:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <title>Hello, Strapdown</title>
  <meta charset="utf-8" />
  <xmp theme="cerulean" style="display:none;"
>

# Markdown Title

All your awesome markdown content goes here.

## Chapter 1

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore
et dolore magna aliqua.

## Chapter 2

MathJax is now supported, so the following will rock!

$$ \left( \sum_{k=1}^n a_k b_k \right)^2 \leq \left( \sum_{k=1}^n a_k^2 \right) \left( \sum_{k=1}^n b_k^2 \right) $$

  </xmp>
  <script src="https://cdn.ztx.io/strapdown/strapdown.min.js"></script>
</html>

That’s it. No js or css file. No build. No nothing. Just one index.html.

Now you just need to edit the markdown in between the <xmp ...> and </xmp> tags.

Caveats

Is it the perfect solution? No! But a very quick one and if I only need a quick and dirty way to render an markdown site it does the job. Is there a better way? Maybe. But I didn’t want to search even longer.

One other problem is that the original library Strapdown is not really maintained anymore. I liked to a fork Strapdown-zeta which has move features and more recent development, but it also doesn’t look that active anymore. It would need https.

Example taken from the website I used it for.

Conclusion

I think it is fine work a quick website you don’t really care much about and don’t plan to extent that much in the future. If you need a blog or more options with themes or you care more how it looks this is not for you. Else go ahead and hack away my friend! 😃