<story><title>The appeal of using plain HTML pages (2019)</title><url>https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/PlainHTMLAppeal</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>uncomputation</author><text>Yes, this one million times over. I have went from home-rolled React to Jekyll to Gatsby to Hugo and now seriously considering just doing my own HTML&amp;#x2F;CSS. Practically, I have rarely run into the issues other markup languages and SSGs are supposed to fix and more often, I find their constraints actually limiting&amp;#x2F;complicating my fairly simple desires. If I want to add movie&amp;#x2F;album reviews, rather than just making &amp;#x2F;reviews directory with some files and some basic CSS, I get stuck thinking about Hugo &amp;quot;archetypes&amp;quot; and templates and _index.md and layouts and all of this baggage. I wanted to add support for my site to use my custom &amp;quot;CSS as S-expressions&amp;quot; parser [0], but got turned off by the idea of integrating Hugo &amp;quot;pipelines&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;assets&amp;quot; or all of that. Not to mention that this grows ever more overwhelming if I take a months-long break and have to Google how to start my own blog server! Then I look at RMS&amp;#x27; site and, ugly as it is, it has held up and looks way easier to update and less constrained by any premeditated structure&amp;#x2F;hierarchy.&lt;p&gt;[0]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;uncomputation.net&amp;#x2F;cascading-style-s-expressions&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;uncomputation.net&amp;#x2F;cascading-style-s-expressions&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>notriddle</author><text>RSS.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re writing a blog, then you probably want a way for people to subscribe to it instead of making them visit your site manually. Unless you are confident that you not only CAN write a feed by hand, but will never forget to hand-update it after updating the post itself, you&amp;#x27;re going to want to at least have the RSS feed be auto-generated.&lt;p&gt;And once you&amp;#x27;ve added the infrastructure to auto-generate the RSS index, there&amp;#x27;s very little point in not auto-generating the HTML index, too. If only because, that way, you won&amp;#x27;t forget to run it.</text></comment>
<story><title>The appeal of using plain HTML pages (2019)</title><url>https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/PlainHTMLAppeal</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>uncomputation</author><text>Yes, this one million times over. I have went from home-rolled React to Jekyll to Gatsby to Hugo and now seriously considering just doing my own HTML&amp;#x2F;CSS. Practically, I have rarely run into the issues other markup languages and SSGs are supposed to fix and more often, I find their constraints actually limiting&amp;#x2F;complicating my fairly simple desires. If I want to add movie&amp;#x2F;album reviews, rather than just making &amp;#x2F;reviews directory with some files and some basic CSS, I get stuck thinking about Hugo &amp;quot;archetypes&amp;quot; and templates and _index.md and layouts and all of this baggage. I wanted to add support for my site to use my custom &amp;quot;CSS as S-expressions&amp;quot; parser [0], but got turned off by the idea of integrating Hugo &amp;quot;pipelines&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;assets&amp;quot; or all of that. Not to mention that this grows ever more overwhelming if I take a months-long break and have to Google how to start my own blog server! Then I look at RMS&amp;#x27; site and, ugly as it is, it has held up and looks way easier to update and less constrained by any premeditated structure&amp;#x2F;hierarchy.&lt;p&gt;[0]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;uncomputation.net&amp;#x2F;cascading-style-s-expressions&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;uncomputation.net&amp;#x2F;cascading-style-s-expressions&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hk__2</author><text>Have you tried Jekyll? I don’t know Hugo; I like Jekyll because it’s very simple with very little abstraction. My blog is just some hand-written HTML with liquid templating. I like how you can add any metadata you want to a post&amp;#x2F;page and then use it in your templates.</text></comment>