Nitin, you made some fair points. I can't help feeling that static site generators (SSG) are being shoehorned into solving problems they were not meant to address. I think SSG was designed to make creation and management of static site content fast and easy. No need for a CMS. Create a few dozen pages in Markdown, add a template, build, copy files to the production web server. Update once or twice a quarter. Simple. Elegant.

But when the website is no longer static, when the website is updated frequently -- hourly, daily, weekly -- it seems to me that it is no longer a static web site. And when one uses an SSG to rebuild a web site hourly/daily/weekly, one runs into issues. Then one starts to need continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) tools. Those are developer tools/techniques, right? One then starts outsourcing control of the technology stack to GitHub and Netlify etc. to get around the inherent limitations of the tool. And that, that is what I am pushing back on.

It's like trying to find ways to put a nail in the wall without using a hammer because the only tool you want to use is a screwdriver. Blogging for me is about publishing my content without friction, not about SSG and CMS etc.

As an experiment, I set up Hugo on my Mac and tried to develop a workflow for publishing my photo blog post. The initial setup was easy. Install Hugo, install a WORKING theme (there is a lot of shitty ones), mess around for hours with YAML to get an index. Now that was all done I could create a post. I wrote the text in a Markdown text editor just like I do with WordPress. Normally I would expport my processed and edited images directly from Adobe Lightroom to WordPress. That makes publishing a new photo post easy. Launch browser, click browser bookmark for a new post, copy/paste text from Byword, click add feature image, select image, click "add image" for each image I want to add, click publish.

With Hugo, I have to export the image to a folder, then I find the path and name for each image and copy/paste that into the text editor, that means having two windows open -- one at the file system and the other with the text editor. Save text file, build (and with Jekyll wait and wait and wait), copy HTML and image files to web server. Find an error? Edit a text file and rebuild and recopy. I understand why the CI/CD tools are used, but it feels too much like the whole process is DEVELOPER CENTRIC. AND IT SHOWS!

I'm a former web developer/system administrator/systems integrator ( we called ourselves webmasters back in the day) who currently does cybersecurity. Trust me; I understand the technology. I know how to keep a 15-year-old WordPress/Linux/MySQL stack website running smoothly and safely (I may want to blog more about that). To suggest that my skills and talent are not up to the task of an SSG would be folly.

But KISS works! SSG is not KISS. I doubt that few personal websites get enough traffic to warrant optimising for speed and the security risks of WordPress are overhyped. My blog has over 4900 posts and has been on WordPress for almost 15 years.

It all feels too much like "let's erect barriers to entry and all nod our heads at how smart and cool we are". Like those "fauxtographers" who only shoot in manual mode.

And finally, I fall back on this:

If you want to create something useful then it’s crucial that you learn to identify the reason why first. You begin by asking good questions about who will use something and how it will improve their lives.