Jeffgeerling.com has been migrated to Hugo

SSGs are good for static sites with no interactivity or feedback. If you want interactivity or feedback, someone (you or a 3rd party service provider) is going to have to run a server.

If you're running a server anyway, it seems trivial to serve content dynamically generated from markdown - all an SSG pipeline adds is more dependencies and stuff to break.

I know there's a fair few big nerd blogs powered by static sites, but when you really consider the full stack and frequency of work that's being done or the number of 3rd party external services they're having to depend on, they'd have been better by many metrics if the nerds had just written themselves a custom backend from the start.

Jeff: I think you'll regret this. I think you'll waste 5 - 10 years trying to shoehorn in basic interactivity like comments, and land on a compromised solution.

I also used and managed Drupal and Joomla before I went to SSGs, and then finally realised there's a sensible midpoint for the pain you're feeling: you write/run a simple server that dynamically compiles your markdown - good ol' SSR. It's significantly lighter, cheaper and easier than drupal, and lets you keep all the flexibility and features you need a server for. Don't take cave to the "self hosted tech was too hard so I took the easy route that forces me to also use 3rd party services instead" option.

SSGing your personal site is the first step to handing it over to 3rd party services entirely IMO.

prose is fully open source as well: https://github.com/picosh/pico

It even has a Hugo migration repo for when users want to make the jump

https://github.com/picosh/prose-hugo

Alternatively you can use https://pgs.sh to deploy your Hugo blog using just rsync. The entire workflow starts and finishes in the terminal.

Also have a RSS feed generator and it can highlight code in most programming languages, which is important to me as I write posts on many languages.

I did try Hugo before I went on to implement my own, and I got a few things from Hugo into mine, but Hugo just looked like far too overengineered for what I wanted (essentially, easy templating with markdown as the main language but able to include content from other files either in raw HTML or also markdown, with each file being able to define variables that can be used in the templating language which has support for the usual "expression language" constructs). I used the Go built-in parser for the expression language so it was super easy to implement it!

Used this for code syntax higlighting: https://github.com/alecthomas/chroma And this for markdown: https://github.com/russross/blackfriday

The rest I implemented myself in simple to read Go code.

Until you have enough visitors or evil AI bots scraping your site so that it crashes, or if you're using an auto-scaling provider, costs you real money.

The problem isn't in markdown→HTML conversion (which is pretty fast), it's that it's a first step in adding more bells and whistles, and before you know it, you're running a nextjs blog which requires server-side nodejs daemon so that your light/dark theme switch works as copy-pasted from stackoverflow.

For blogs, number of reads vs number of comments or other actions that require a server is probably on the order of 100:1 or 1000:1, even more if many of the page loads are bots/scrapers.

> SSGing your personal site is the first step to handing it over to 3rd party services entirely IMO.

Why? Your interactive/feedback parts can be a 10-line script as well, running on the same site where you'd run Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, Django, or whatever.

Looks like Jeff plans to do exactly that: https://github.com/geerlingguy/jeffgeerling-com/issues/167