Collecting my attempts to improve at tech, art, and life

SSG is for putterers

Tags: ssg blogging puttering indieweb

Kev Quirk on static site generatorsWordPress Creator Vs The Jamstack (2020-05-20)

SSGs are really cool and super fun to play with – I’m really enjoying it on my side project; but I wish a lot of devs would stop touting about how amazingly simple they are, as it’s just not the case.

I often see “such and such Static Site Generator is simple!” tweets, and wonder what exactly they’re comparing it to. DIY dentistry perhaps?

As much as I love puttering with static site generators, “puttering” is the main charm of an SSG. The hooks to customize are right there on the surface. Heck Eleventy is nothing but hooks. And having everything in a git repository is just a developer-focused version of a smart backup plan.

For the Jamstack side of things, I’m not sure I see the advantage of relying on a load of external services over oh say for example having a database and an internal comment system. You know, like Wordpress. Something I’ve been thinking about a lot in relation to my own site leaning so much on webmention.io.


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Added to vault 2024-01-15. Updated on 2024-02-01