Comment by wvenable

I also decided to develop my personal website in plain HTML. I looked into a bunch of static site generators and found that direction to be too complicated and slow for me.

I still wanted the ability to have a common headers and footers and unique sections without repeating myself in every file. So I created a very small PHP application (just 5 files) and each page or blog post is a single PHP file in a directory. These PHP files have a small bit of metadata code at the top but are otherwise just plain HTML files. In each directory is layout file that wraps the content and these nest up the directory structure. So my site has a common header and footer and each section has their own subheader.

With the ability to publish by git push to the server, writing a blog post is as easy as creating a new file, git commit, and git push.