The deal is that a lot of static site generators are very complicated (perhaps needlessly so), despite the fact that static sites are technically very simple. Perhaps some people really leverage the power of Next.js, but when I tried it, I felt that it was super heavyweight when I just needed to template html files.

Of course, that doesn't mean I need to write my own. I just used a simpler SSG. In my case Jekyll.

I wrote my own one also. It's ~100 lines of Go, generates the raw html that I commit to Git and which CloudFlare Pages automatically then deploys from a sub-folder for me.

I don't need to set up S3, Varnish, a server, a database, making sure my server + cms is up to date. It costs me $0, it's on a cdn and it's lightning fast + no headache. What's not to like?

No maintenance.

When I had a dynamic blog (DB backend, etc), I got hacked because I wasn't updating the SW often. Not having to worry about things like that is a significant quality of life difference. I want to run my life, not have my tools run them.

But frankly, let's invert the question. What exactly is the benefit of using a CMS vs an SSG like Pelican? After having used the latter for over a decade, it's dead simple. Open a file. Write your content. Run make. And publish. It's trivial to back up. I don't have to know what a cache is. I don't have to keep updating SW. What is the actual benefit of a CMS for a single user like me?

Cheap/free static hosting is plentiful, static sites don’t have packages I need to keep up to date to avoid vulnerabilities, and writing posts/pages in a format like Markdown makes them dead simple to migrate between systems. Additionally, using a service like Netlify or GitHub Pages affords flexibility — all I need is a git client, a text editor, and an internet connection that can manage to transmit a couple of kilobytes. Don’t even need a browser.

Aside from that, a CMS is overkill for something like a simple blog. I might consider one for a more complex site but for a blog there’s no need.

Hosting a static site is simple and can even be done for free.

Even though you can make a CMS fast, with a static site you can forget about performance altogether.

Finally, it meshes very nicely with editing files in eg markdown locally, which for some people (like me who live in Neovim) is a much nicer experience than editing things in a webpage.

I prefer using markdown files in a repo and generating my website using a SSG, because I find managing plain text files and a simple CI/CD pipeline to deploy easier to manage. The tooling for writing is my editor of choice, deploy is a git push and I don’t have to run a server or long running process. I can also easily migrate to any type of hosting more easily. I can see someone who is more used to Wordpress for example finding your workflow easier. It really mostly comes down to personal preference and what tools you are used to.

Being able to deploy a bunch of HTML files to static hosting services, no runtime like PHP etc. required.

If you use a CMS, it has to run somewhere. If you don’t want it on a server, you probably don’t have the same config on your dev machine. Most CMS require you to configure root domain paths etc. and they are different on your local machine. It’s all a lot more complicated than using an SSG to transpile a bunch of markdown files to HTML on a dev machine and upload them.