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Comment by sanderjd | Hacker News Reader

Came here to say something very much like this. A good static site generator has no downsides:

- It's easier for you, the savvy developer who groks the toolchain, because it allows structure and reduces repetition.

- It may very well be easier for the next person who wants to add a page or change some copy, because editing Markdown and running a couple (admittedly esoteric) commands is likely still easier than editing HTML directly.

- If the next person doesn't understand or like the toolchain, they can ignore it entirely and edit the HTML directly, which is no worse than if you didn't use a generator at all.

So yeah, you don't have to use tools, and yeah, CMS sites and compile-to-CSS is probably overused in the small-site market, but I think static-site-from-Markdown with vanilla CSS is a pretty sweet spot for this!

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Er, sure it does:

* No web UI. This may be a blocker for business folks who want to update a blog. This is a blocker for folks who are using devices like iPad's to update blogs (which is a huge reason why I moved away from things like Octopress and moved toward things like Ghost or Wordpress.) This may be a blocker for folks who don't always have the tools on whatever machine they're using at the time in order to generate the site.

* No imposed structure. It's easier to impose a web UI form that locks folks into certain workflows than it is to just give them a git repository with all sorts of stuff strung about, with no apparent structure other than the FS structure.

Whoops, I wasn't clear - I mean that using a static site generator has no downsides relative to writing HTML/CSS directly. Your downsides are both relative to using more tooling.

In terms of those downsides, I agree with you for larger sites, but not for the kind of really small sites the OP was talking about.

Surely that's not a static site? I think the author was trying to say that people rely to heavily on tools to achieve simple goals; using a tool or framework for your own amusement can sway you away from the actual goal, in his case making a static website for an animal shelter.

You can still have a web UI and produce a static website.

I've written blogging software that did just that. Every time the author edited/added something in the web UI (which saved to a db), it just re-'compiled' the particular pages.

One downside might be that if the next person (person N+1) doesn't know the system and just edits the HTML and CSS by hand for a few months or years, and then person N+k comes along and runs the generate script, he potentially blows away any edits that weren't done with markdown and the site generator.

I suppose you could use the static generator for the initial build and then throw it all away yourself, but that's basically the same as not using it at all.

You're right. I suppose nothing is perfect!

Backup, backup, backup. ;)

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