Some thoughts on static site generators
As you might notice, this new blog is built in 11ty. I've had some experience of late with Static Site generators, namely 11ty, Docusaurus, Hugo and Gatsby, and my general feeling is that none of them are particularly good.
Before people get angry and tell me that I need to recompile my kernel, let me explain the direction I'm coming from. Non-technical people are still using Wordpress to build what should be static sites. If I weren't so cheap, I'd also still be using Wordpress, but instead have spent many hours getting frustrated at inadequate tooling, awful documentation and a complete lack of decent theming. Because of this, as an industry we've failed.
The current situation isn't good enough for an average, non-technical, user to add content after the initial setup. I would still recommend a platform like Squarespace or Wordpress to people who don't have a permanent developer available or don't care to spend hours and hours reading sub-par documentation.
That said, I'm going to stick it out with 11ty for a while. It took me way too long to get it setup, but I'm happy with my setup and know how to do the styling now. Since I'm technical, I can manually edit styles and markdown files for new blog posts, because all of the static site generator CMS libraries are also trash.
