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Comment by rectang | Hacker News Reader

Another thing I find weird is how bloated static typical site generator tools are. The delivery medium of static HTML is timeless. But the odds that a static site generator with dozens of dependencies will still work N years from now? Grim.

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just write html by hand. With html5, implicit and auto-closing tags, it's really not more difficult than markdown. Then your "generator" is simply the cat program, that appends a common header and footer.

They all started off lean and mean. Then after adding feature after feature they become bloated. Then the next lean-and-mean static HTMl generator becomes vogue.

Bashblog[1] is pretty lean, and doesn't use any dependencies.

[1] https://github.com/cfenollosa/bashblog

One of the reasons I like Hugo: it's a single executable that will basically work forever. There's no need to update to a newer version if the one you have meets your needs.

'Typically' meaning...? Jekyll? Gatsby?

I have a couple of older static sites (one using Jekyll/Octopress, one using Middleman), and if I ever do a bundle update something is guaranteed to break. Not sure if that's the "bloat" the parent comment is talking about though.

I've been using Perl Template::Toolkit since around 2001 and it's even better since version 3 was released. Worth a try. You don't even need to know Perl to make use of it.

Yes. I was on Jekyll 2 years ago, I don’t think I’ll be able to compile it in two years. It’s already on an old version of Ruby if I remember, if not Bundle or Gulp or... and it’s just a simple website.

I've had this exact issue with my Middleman sites.

That is why I've changed to Hugo (from Hexo & Gatsby). It does exactly what is supposed to, it doesn't import any dependencies and it is quite fast. Besides, no runtime is required.

I thought about plain HTML, but writing blog articles with it is a bit of a pain. Hugo was quite the right balance.

agreed, but for me the appeal of static site generation is that the input is typically just markdown and some templates so even if a particular generator ceases to be supported it should be trivial to drop in a replacement in whatever the currently fashionable language is.

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