I’ve been seeing a lot of these kinds of posts and sentiments lately.
Yes, it _is_ easier to write plain ol HTML. But how do you handle consistency by hand writing each page? How do you scale your site or add * number of posts or headers and footers that do things like show the latest post? If you update a link somewhere, how do you ensure all the links pointing to it are valid?
We don’t do these things because we’re masochistic. We do them because they, on the net, make things easier. I suspect this sentiment is some kind of new version of the Eternal September, where people previously unexposed to the hardships of creating functional websites think we somehow missed something in our slow march toward where we are now.
I happen to have a hand built static site. It had two pages. When I built the second page, I took the first html file, copy pasted it into a new path and made the changes. That works splendidly for a two page site. But most sites are not this way, I imagine.
> How do you scale your site or add * number of posts or headers and footers that do things like show the latest post?
It depends on your needs, some use a templating language (like Handlebars, Nunjucks, Pug, etc), others might write a script to build the site
The problem with many static site generators is that they grow beyond their initial mission and get bloated in an effort to please a wider audience, so previous adopters get tired of the imposed complexity and problematic dependencies they didn't need or ask for and start looking for simpler solutions that meet their needs.
I want to migrate, but my blog currently has this cool thing and I need it.
And since the audience probably can't settle, and keep trying different setups, all SSGs grow in complexity and more or less reach feature parity among each other.
> That sounds an awful lot like a static site generator to me?
Right? They didn't abandon the concept, they just picked a solution that better fits their needs. Less headache, less abstraction, and less surprises overall.
Yes, it _is_ easier to write plain ol HTML. But how do you handle consistency by hand writing each page? How do you scale your site or add * number of posts or headers and footers that do things like show the latest post? If you update a link somewhere, how do you ensure all the links pointing to it are valid?
We don’t do these things because we’re masochistic. We do them because they, on the net, make things easier. I suspect this sentiment is some kind of new version of the Eternal September, where people previously unexposed to the hardships of creating functional websites think we somehow missed something in our slow march toward where we are now.
I happen to have a hand built static site. It had two pages. When I built the second page, I took the first html file, copy pasted it into a new path and made the changes. That works splendidly for a two page site. But most sites are not this way, I imagine.