Comment by oneeyedpigeon
16 days ago
Another way of looking at it is that Hugo, eleventy, etc. are reinventions of pandoc, makefile etc. The latter things came first!
16 days ago
Another way of looking at it is that Hugo, eleventy, etc. are reinventions of pandoc, makefile etc. The latter things came first!
I would rather say that the former group are wrappers around the latter group. Using an SSG doesn't just mean converting Markdown etc. source and orchestrating a build process of some sort, but also filling in templates and providing useful build steps to orchestrate (such as generating additional pages that reference the actual article content: archives, collections grouped by tags or categories, etc.). They also generally implement things like the live reloading that the author mentioned as missing.
I'm currently using Nikola and have done quite a bit of customization - by hacking around and learning modern web stuff as I go (the last time I did this stuff seriously, jQuery was dominant and Bootstrap was brand new - of course I'm not writing a bunch of JavaScript for a blog, but that also presumably dates my understanding of HTML and CSS). I've found that even though there's way more stuff in here than I really want, it's really nice to have that kind of scaffolding to start, and I can strip it away as I customize.