Jeffgeerling.com has been migrated to Hugo

My point the entire time has been that an SSG is not good for sites that want interactivity.

I agree with you, lots of blogs/sites do fine with just tag/category. Those sites don't have interactivity and so you could SSG them and use free static hosting. We're in agreement on this. But I have explicitly been talking about sites that want interaction. Still - how many personal sites that "do fine without interactivity" are actually "interactivity was too much of a technical/maintenance challenge"?

I completely see how a server based solution is an order of magnitude more effort. We agree on that too. Running any servers efficiently typically has fixed overhead for server infra and processes. Running 3 pieces of server software or even 3 servers is harder than 1, but significantly less than 3x harder.

If you want interactivity, a server is needed. This means you are already maintaining, monitoring, optimising and securing a server solution. Adding SSG processes alongside your existing server solution does not remove any problems relating to servers, because you still have servers. It does add complexity though because you're running servers, and some SSG pipelines. These architectures clash and create more work. Running 2 conflicting architectures can be a lot more more than 2x harder than running 1 architecture.

If you want interactivity and don't want to run a server, then you must use a 3rd party service. This brings its own issues, especially if you have a personal website because you want to own your own stuff.

I feel like you're repeating to me "servers are hard, SSGs are good" - you can't have an SSG without a server, and you definitely can't have interactivity. If you have a server anyways for comments or search, then by using SSGs, you're not removing your need to deal with servers, you're adding an extra picky new thing to your servers. And what complex feature of a personal website does the SSG solve specifically? Generate the text/HTML. Compared to comments and search, generating html from markdown is so painfully easy. SSGs tie our hands behind our backs for the hard interactivity problems to solve the easy text rendering problem.

This seems like a really, really crystal clear point to me. But you, Jeff and Susam have all tried to say that SSGs are generally better, easier, safer or faster. I felt like that from 2016 - 2024. But when you've been pressed, all of you have ended up saying variations on:

- SSGs are great for sites without interactivity (agree, you know and I know though, most personal websites do want some form of interactivity, even just search or comments, and the only reason not to is technical hurdles.)

- Comments and Search are doable with SSGs, but not trivially, or without compromising on things which were traditionally seen as crucial for an open and accessible web (agree, see jeffs comments and search tickets)

- You use SSGs not to solve any particular problem, but just for fun. (agree, that's fine, but if that's your only reason, that's probably a sign there's virtually no technical advantages.)

- The problems you used the SSG for originally have been solved with compute power, storage, connectivity and bandwidth becoming more available over the past decade

I really appreciate and respect your's, Jeff's and Susam's time to respond, I want to be in agreement with you, as you all have the experience and reputation in personal websites. I just can't see it though. I mean this whole HN topic is about Jeff's post "Jeffgeerling.com has been migrated to Hugo" which on the surface looks like a success for the ease of SSGs, but when you probe deeper, it's the text that's been migrated, and comments and search have been disabled.

Why are we here if SSGs are so obviously the easiest, most reliable way to run a personal website? Jeff's site is currently working less than it did before and the fixes are future TODOs are essentially "pick a compromise" (sorry, no offence Jeff - I still think you're great!)

Ah, that makes more sense. I would agree that for sites that need more than the bare minimum server-side still makes a lot of sense (I was just confused here in the context of little personal sites / blogs).

> Isn't your website responsive?

It is but the max width is at a point where most folks on a tablet and desktop will see that width so I optimize for that. Mobile always looks ok in the end, but I don't think about how sentences wrap there.

> I guess you're more of a perfectionist than I am.

I try not to get hung up but seeing live previews doesn't take much extra time. The same with asset digesting, once it's set up it happens automatically without thinking.

There's also the mental tax of knowing you're using something semi-annoying all the time, that bugs me if I know it can be improved.

I agree, nothing is perfect, there's a time and place for everything - I just think the coverage and advocacy of SSGs is disproportionate to the number of places where they improve things. I'm going to summarise the discussions I've had in this topic in a post over the next few weeks and I'll post it here. Thanks for humouring and challenging me :)

I still do feel there's something not quite right. Hopefully I'll be able to get it out in the summary as I think we're all done with walls of text here. But I think you actually captured it perfectly in your last remark:

> For my own solo projects, the ease of hosting for static sites is often such a big win for me that I'm willing to forego some interactivity even though more interactive features would be nice.

They make the web worse for the world by tempting the developer to take the easier, less interactive route than what would have been taken in the pre-SSG world.

I think I'm troubled by this because the idea "it makes it easy to do the lazy, worse thing" seems completely at odds with the fact that it seems to be what the people I would consider leaders in the field are doing. That's why I still wonder if this view might be a me problem, or maybe the field is just moving backwards? I don't know.

Anyway, thanks again!

This is all entirely fair, thank you, I understand, I didn't mean to misrepresent.

> However, since I maintain my personal website as a hobby, I need to make the tradeoffs that feel right to me. I realise this is not a very satisfying answer to the question of whether a hybrid solution like mine (SSG plus server side programming) has merits. But I was never trying to argue its merits in the first place.

Hey, I'm a firm believer in the idea that the best solution for a personal website is the one that's the most fun for the owner to maintain! The reminder that it's not all about technical merit makes yours one of the more satisfying answers - thanks again for the considered responses:)