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Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

Oh no. I'm the "weird dude who writes raw html".

Artisanally hand-crafted HTML + CSS + JS. Hosted on Netlify. A+++ would recommend. My content works locally just by double-clicking a .html file. I can publish or edit live content by pushing to my private Git repro. Super easy.

Static site generators suck balls and are 10x more trouble than they're worth. I always know exactly what I want my blog posts to look like. Static generators can make it extremely difficult to generate the precise output html I know I want. It's radically simpler to just add some extra padding if it is more aesthetically pleasing for that specific content.

If you'd like to judge for yourself: https://www.forrestthewoods.com/

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So I live this idea, but what if I want to change something in the header across the whole site? I don't want to repeat myself.

How often do you change your header? How long would it take to make that change?

I suspect the answer is “almost never” and “less than an hour”.

My experience is that time spent repeating yourself is astronomically less than time spent doing work to avoid repeating yourself.

Depends on how many times you repeat yourself. A dozen of times? Sure. A hundred times? I don't think so. You can write a program that programmatically replaces the footer and header, provided that the content and layout is properly separated. But at that point, you might as well just have a build tool, and have your content and layout decoupled in the first place.

Fair point, lots of people never actually go past ten or more blog posts. Still, even a simple build tool in bash works better.

> at that point, you might as well just have a build tool, and have your content and layout decoupled in the first place

Maybe. One of the (many) problems with static generators is that it's really really really hard to get it to generate the code you want. It's easy to get it 95% of the way there. But that last 5%? It's brutal, and sometimes impossible.

A tool automatically does 95% and can be manually finished is very different from a tool that must do everything 100%.

A good rule of thumb would be "use wordpress until you hit 50 posts". At that point decide what makes sense for your content. And at this point you should know what you want, so any choice you make is likely to stick.

I don't recommend handcrafted HTML for most people. But I do think more folks should at least consider it. For my content it both gives more control AND saves me time. Even if I have to do a little grunt work every once in a blue moon.

You don't need even a static generator really, even just

  cat header.html page1.html footer.html > build/page1.html

would work

This is such a simple yet powerful idea I don't know how could I not think of that before.

Thanks. 'cat' will be my static site generator.

I put together something like this with PHP, like how I did websites in ancient times with SSI[1], but it output a static site. It never occurred to me I could just cat them.

I could even still use PHP or any language to generate some components and just cat the output with the others into one file. That would help people who prefer to write in markdown. Just run it through a markdown->HTML converter and output it to a file with header and footer included.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Includes

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