Static site generators focus on the wrong thing

However I just found this site: http://staticsitegenerators.net/ , which is an impressiv elisting, so possibly I'll find something that fits my needs or gives me a starting point.

I guess I should put the full Rakefile up on that post. Here are the relevant parts:

    desc "generate and deploy"
    task :deploy => ['jekyll:generate', 'deploy:deploy']
    
    namespace :deploy do 
      task :deploy do
        `rsync -r _site/ #{USER}@#{HOST}:#{DEPLOY_DIR}/`
      end
    end
    
    namespace :jekyll do
      desc "start the jekyll server in auto mode"
      task :server, :num_posts do |t, args|
        num_posts = args[:num_posts]
        cmd = "jekyll --auto --server --pygments"
        cmd += " --limit_posts #{num_posts}" if num_posts
        puts "running #{cmd}"
        exec(cmd)
      end
    
      desc "generate the site one time"
      task :generate => :clean do
        `jekyll --no-auto --pygments`
      end
    
      desc "remove the generated site"
      task :clean do
        `rm -rf _site`
      end
    end

The truth of the matter is, for most web writers, any CMS is plenty performant. You probably won't even need a cache, and if you end up needing one, it's usually pretty straightforward to add it. And it's pretty self-evident to me that updating one document and saving it is easier than re-generating the updated parts of your website with some script before git-this-git-that.

One good argument against CMS is security: many of them have a history of security woes. This is partly why I ended up writing my own very minimal CMS engine. All it does is read some markdown files and render them. For me, that achieves both security (or at least if not, it's easier for me to go through my 100 lines of Ruby code than the Wordpress codebase) and low friction.

I'm guessing most of the static site generators probably fulfilled the needs of the programmer who wrote them (which is totally fine and kudos to them for releasing their work so others could benefit). However, static site generators are not what you'd call "user-friendly" (in my view) unless you're comfortable with the command line and like markdown. (Wordpress isn't particulalry user-friendly either, but more so than static site generators in my opinion.)

Markdown -> script to generate a page with a header and footer and basic navigation.

Another separate script to invoke lftp to sync with remote server when ready to publish. Lftp looks after incremental updating.

In emergency, I can ssh into server and edit the html with nano. As I have shell access, I could just run the page generation script on the server I suppose.