» "the problem with static site generators"
basically, it's complicated.
I was on break at work recently and came across a post linked from hackernews, on the topic of the surprising complexity of SSG's such as Hugo, Jekyll, and 11ty. I'm annoyed that I have to launch into this without the actual post to cite and source, but I remember my reaction and thoughts about it, which will do for now.
The post raised an important observation that I felt deep in my bones, which is that static-site generators such as Hugo tend to be annoying to use. A part of this website's DNA is an evolved response to my own decision to stick with something a bit more old school - it's not a pure SSG per se, but by creating a file and giving it the right YAML metadata in the right folder, a little php magic generates the proper website markup and structure.
My experience with SSG's is that when I was a kid in the early 2000's, I made websites by uploading HTML and PHP files to a server using an FTP client, and then a decade later started doing it again with a raspberry pi, linux and ssh. I'm definitely one of those millenials who sort of woke up one day and realized that honest-to-god blogs and stuff were mostly gone. With my newfound respect and love for the potential and power of SSH and the command line, when I started thinking about creating this website the first thing I knew was that I did not want to use WordPress.
In the early 2000's, I liked WordPress and used it often. That being said, in life I tend to be a less-is-more kind of person, and I remember trying out alot of fun little blogging platforms with names I no longer remember - although I do think that with enough time in the internet wayback machine, I could find some info from the source code. I think alot of these would fall under the category of being a "Flat-file CMS", although I've used some platforms like GravCMS and something about it is just intuitively off, like Hugo.
I think the problem with a SSG like Hugo is that it simply does not work as a blogging platform. I think as the average person stopped blogging, the blogosphere began selecting for people still in tech, and when you have silicon valley engineers writing blogs, of course something like Hugo would seem like a fun and beautiful way to manage a blog with minimal effort.
I don't know. I can 'deploy' this website by making my public_html file a git repository. I create and edit posts with a handful of commands and vim. Theoretically I could do it via a web-facing GUI like WordPress.
Going right to the conclusion here: I think SSG's solve a problem that doesn't really exist for a target audience that I dont think exists. If a platform like Hugo is hard to grasp, you are probably better served with more straightforward website or blogging software. Paradoxically, if something like Hugo is intuitive to you - then it would probably be easier just to write your own quick engine built around your own mental sitemap structure, that grabs markdown files from a specific folder and throws a website around them.