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So its done! I finally released a fairly easy to install (from scratch) Hugo based Static Site generator with full ActivityPub support.
It has step-by-step instructions on how to set it up for your own blog or static website.
One of the coolest features for me, other than having your static site blog posts show up as posts in the Fediverse is the support for interacting with those posts. Any replies you leave, likes, or boosts will show up in the "comments" section of the website on the page associated with the post. How cool is that!
I dont use vercel normally either. I used vercel for the first time for this project and liked it.
To answer your question it depends if you want full features or not.
Witout vercel you wont have the serverless functions. They handle things like accepting new followers. So without vercel (or something to take its place) then people can see your account via the fediverse but following it wouldnt really work (you wouldnt see new posts in your feed and your follow request will never get accepted)... but otherwise it will "work" with limited functionality.
That said the serverless functions can be moved to any platform.
You could in theory get rid of the serverless functions and make it all truely static. If you did that (which would take a bit of coding) then theonly time followers would get confirmed would be when you push a new version of the site.. but otherwise you could, in theory, get the full functionality out of it. with some creativity.
@freemo I love hugo. Probably should try new version, not the 5y old one currently using.
On the other side it's a beauty of static hugo binary - even 10y old could still generate web.
@freemo What?! Holy crap! 💜
@ephemeromorph Let me know if you have any questions about it or any feedback or even help if you decide to install it.
@freemo Please can you point out where I can see the 'step by step instructions'? I don't see them on the link you posted.
@ephemeromorph They are in the readme on the repo. Did you not find it, need a link?
@freemo Ohh, I see. Found it, thanks!
@ephemeromorph Wonderful, let me know if you need any help going through it. I think i am the only one to deploy it so far, though I've done it 3 times.
@freemo@qoto.org just noted a bug here regarding the visibility of your post on the *keys: the link to fedipage does not show up for some reason > screenshot from blahaj.zone > same result on firefish, misskey etc
@testing Not a bug.. i changed some things about how the site renders its pages so it broke old boosts knowingly.. but it continues to work properly.. thats just a "ghost"
@freemo@qoto.org congrats for fedipage btw ❣️
following @fedipage@fedipage.com is recommended ♥️
@testing Thank you. Let me know if i can help at all..
Keep in mind being a bit new if you follow it you may get occasional repeat notifications... I try to keep it minimal though. This only happens when i need to change the way AP renders and it needs to resend all the pages out... should be fairly rare but might happen once or twice as i improve the system.
So your welcome to follow but please do so at your own risk :)
This is Mur 
@freemo
Does it support CSS customization for the iframe?
@mur2501 which iframe?
@freemo
The iframe for the feed
@mur2501 You mean the microblogging feed that sits on the right hand side near the menu in the blog?
@freemo
yeah on your blog, isn't that your Mastofeed github project?
@mur2501 no i didnt write mastofeed I just consume it.
But yes mastofeed is fully customizable with css as far as I can tell. Havent tested it though beyond the basic settings.
@freemo Ahh didn't saw the creator of the repo properly.
Anyway that reminds, what projects are you working on currently?
The following are some im particularly active on:
https://git.qoto.org/digipex
https://hub.digipex.io
https://flear.com
https://fedipage.com
https://aparapi.com
I am also just received funding for one of my companies, but that info isnt public yet.
@mur2501 yes i know, thats why im working on it :)
@freemo
actually I would like to work on it, seems very interesting
@mur2501 Aparapi is one of my most challenging projects to contribute to. but also very rewarding.
It is also relatively active with a few devs and with my main company getting funding it will likely funnel some resources into Aparapi. So its a great project to get involved in especially right now.
@freemo
for the documentation part where you try to explain JVM Bytecode I think preceding it with Dennis Yurichev's Reverse Engineering Book's Chapter 4 on JVM would be a good idea to make the doc more consumable for people looking at JVM Bytecode for the first time in life.
@mur2501 Please feel free to get your feet wet by submitting pull requests on the documentation itself.
@freemo That's a nice suggestion. 
@freemo
Change in plans it looks like Yurichev has paywalled his open source book. I am confused about the legalities of directly copying content (with attribution ofcourse) 
@mur2501 You wont be able to directly copy content unless he has released it to the public domain or under an open source license...
However if he did either in the past, and LATER paywalled it you can still use the earlier version freely.
@freemo Well my pirated pdf copy says CC licensed on the front (which technical means it is not pirated)
It is behind a paywall but the license is still CC
@mur2501 does it specify which CC license specifically?
@freemo
The link to the CC license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
The link to book through a ipfs gateway: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/bafykbzacea35aylikyp5xxcwis2ictavesg42qdfpwpgn4zfkwurhocl5r6bs?filename=Understanding%20Assembly%20Language%20%28Reverse%20Engineering%20for%20--%20Dennis%20Yurichev%20--%20March%2026%2C%202023%2C%202023%20--%20ed4f28e673d041b34cb08925d525960e%20--%20Anna%E2%80%99s%20Archive.pdf
@freemo
I have looked into the problem it seems the main issue is using http for googleapis rather than https, browsers seem to block all http link by default. I will change them to https links.
@mur2501 Oh nice, did you submit a push for that as well, ill review shortly.
@freemo I have committed but haven't pushed as there are some other errors and stuffs to due the code being 7 years old. Alot of the links are dead. I have removed the Google Plus button as it exists no more.
Twitter works but the handle is it active still?
and yes in the demonstration page many websites seem to exists no more.
PS: Also I think it would better if we use CDN links rather than actual JS files
@freemo
That flear.com one says it is on sale for 15000USD
If you need any help let me know. It seems fairly stable for me right now. I have 3 sites running it successfully for a little bit now
@paul I found it to be a arelatively simple static site engine overall. But it does take some time to learn the language. If there is something in particular that confuses you just let me know.
$ hugo new content posts/my-first-post.md
Error: failed to resolve "content" to a archetype template
(Just following the first site steps on https://gohugo.io/getting-started/quick-start/ )
Did you run into this as well?
$ hugo new content/post/filename.md
works a lot better.
@paul I would follow the instructions on the git for fedipage rather than hugo if your trying to setup fedipage: https://git.qoto.org/fedipage/fedipage
@paul You doing this in a new project or as part of fedipage?
First I want to get a bit of a feel for it. If it's easy enough, I may examine if there is a way to import my various existing (static site) sites into Hugo, through some converter or so. Those have hundreds of articles and pages, so I'm not typing them in again 😉
Also I'm not going to put a lot of time into it every day. My workdays are long enough. 😉
I moved over from middleman static site generator. The pages moved over without a hitch for me. Any markdown based source should be relatively easy to convert.
Keep in mind Hugo wont give you fediverse/activityPub access on its own. Its just another (nice) static site generator. The ability to integrate with the fediverse is entirely a fedipage thing.
This does not sound like an easy transfer, then. Thank you for the information.
I'm not focussing on the Fedipage part for anything at the moment. If I can't make Hugo work for me 'as is' (including importing my existing sites), then that route is not happening.
It might be interesting for a new site I could set up. But that's not in the books yet.
@paul Going from raw html will be more difficult.
You might need some additional effort.
When you write your journal entries then you are writing them in raw HTML? If not what markup language do you write your articles in?
See image of Publii's post editor:
You will probably start crying now. Sorry.
@paul Ohhh its a wysiwig... yea sadly unless you can find a way to convert it you may be in for some trouble. Personally this is why i dont use blogging tools that dont use open standard formats like markdown to begin with.
Hugo does support html markup but you'd likely have to heavily edit that format since it would have to be an html fragment without all the header and styling stuff.
Because I couldn't get the example to work on the quickstart page (the error is still there after all those years), I went for Publii. I'd have no problem writing some Python to convert the wordpest XML backup into markdown.
@freemo interesting! How complicated would it be to deploy elsewhere than Vercel? Just curious, as I don’t typically use Vercel myself.
Great to see more AP-compatible code.