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cthorlast Sunday at 3:28 PM1 replyview on HN

https://cthor.me/SSG

Getting someone else's SSG to do exactly what you want (and nothing more) takes longer than just building it yourself. Juice isn't worth the squeeze.


Replies

danguslast Sunday at 3:59 PM

I disagree with your take there.

> It took me a weekend to write the initial Perl script that made this site. It took me another weekend to do the Rust rewrite (although porting all the content took two weeks). These are not complicated programs.

My last Hugo site took 30 minutes to deploy, not a whole weekend. Picked a theme, pasted in content.

> You want free web hosting? Hugo might be the right option.

An extremely good reason to pick Hugo especially if you don’t have the know-how to build your own SSG. You don’t need to know a programming language at all to use it.

Again, I have to throw criticism toward this idea that everyone who wants a static site generator already has the skills required to make one.

And I’m not saying it covers every use case like the kind of person who is willing to pay $100+ per year on a full blown solution like Shopify and Squarespace. It fits a niche: someone who wants their content online without coding with no hosting cost and doesn’t want to rely on third party platforms like Substack.