The professional web development community is saturated with 20 years of tooling and discourse built around web frameworks because we went to work building the frontends of web apps. However, like the roots of a mycelial organism the web of documents still forms a vast if under-appreciated part of the internet.
Websites in the vision of Xanadu or Tim Berners-Lee were a way to distribute writing whether for professional communication or personal self expression. An enormous amount of daily life is still document driven. Whatever the current tech trend is when you’re reading this odds are it was started by a blog post, whatever you’ve built today probably required consulting multiple sources of documentation.
Ours standard tools make it all too easy to spin up quite elaborate environments quickly so even a linktree site requires a dozen npm packages. Carrying the complexity of a scalable, FAANG friendly, framework is a burden that makes small projects harder.
Yet a website can be a very simple thing and you can get an enormous amount done with plain HTML, CSS and just a dash of Javascript. These core technologies have come a long way in recent years, and I’d highly recommend stopping to just browse though some codepens or watch a Kevin Powell video to see some really slick stuff.
This is why Static Site Generators (SSGs) are fantastic because they provide just enough convenience to make working with plain HTML and CSS fun. Reading HTML is nobodies idea of a good time, but using markdown makes writing prose a much more pleasant experience and templating makes reuse straightforward without removing the productive constraints of simple webtech.
Having the right tool available for the job, one that introduces the minimum complexity to achieve it’s ends, makes smaller projects inviting rather than overwhelming. SSGs are not a return to an older internet, but they inherit it’s strengths and perhaps som of it’s charm.
Moving between working with CMS like Drupal, static sites for documentation, or corporate knowlegebases like Confluence has hammered home the importance of keeping a lid on complexity and just how impactful tool choice can be. Using SSGs has been a breath of fresh air in miasma of web development tooling.
I’ve used many SSGs but one of my favourites is goHugo, it’s what I’ve used professionally for many years and what I used to make this blog. You can find the super simple goHugo theme that I use for testing and ideation on my github.