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First, there was Wordpress. Then people got really sick of deploying Wordpress and figured, "do I even need dynamic content?". Along came Jekyll, Hugo, and so on. Just write your content in Markdown (or equivalent), then run a script to output your HTML blob, which you copy to some httpd you stood up somewhere.

For the first time in a long time, we were trending towards a simpler way to author web content. This felt great!

However, as I discovered, static site generators (Jekyll in my case), were really great if you wanted to do the limited set of things that they have rails for. For the most part, that is writing Markdown and embedding pictures. If you need to extend Jekyll, it is a very frustrating and limiting experience.

Converting a site to Jekyll made me so upset that I went home and wrote my own static site generator, sssgen. I'm biased of course, but I think it's better than anything else out there, because I wrote it to have all the power of Jekyll while still having a simple and flexible source.

I used this for my blog for a while, and then I realized that I wanted to add some dynamic behavior to my blog, and I had to do it on the client side (in Javascript), because I had artificially limited myself to a static website.

This is when I realized how dumb I am. I'm a programmer, so why would I shy away from writing a little code to have the maximum flexibility in authorship? I asked myself these questions:

• Is it significantly faster to author text in Markdown? .. No, because usually I spent the bulk of the time thinking about what to say, not adding markup.
• Is a static website significantly faster to serve? .. No, and who cares if it's a few milliseconds slower?

So I converted to a stack comprised of the most boring choices that I could make: nginx/python/gunicorn/flask.

The result is a reasonably quick loading blog, that deploys to any debian-like that I have root ssh access to, and supports SSL. And, I can make it do whatever I want.