It's a mess, and evokes abject horror in some people, but I'll continue to defend the merit of just writing a shell script. I moved it to hugo years ago (ironically) but my old site worked like that: https://github.com/japanoise/website/blob/cdf728d4ebea75cbc9...

It's not pretty to look at, but it can be read, understood, and maintained by one person.

+1 to japanoise's suggestion to write your own static blog script. Here's mine, which I initially wrote several years ago after evaluating & having issues with many other options: https://github.com/Sequoia/sequoia.github.com/blob/rewrite/s...

I recently evaluated migrating to Hugo to ditch my hastily written script & use a 'robust, mature' tool. I wanted to add an RSS feed and figured "why work more on my one off script, I could use a pre-built solution!" But migrating was indeed a pain in the butt, and it quickly became clear that writing a function to output an RSS feed was much faster than doing everything I needed to migrate.

Static blogs are very simple, and performance doesn't matter that much for all but the most prolific authors, and you can improve performance if needed. Write your own script!

I'm not sure if I'd call it sound advice - but there's not much stopping you from building a site based around (client side) Javascript these days. Maybe a markdown parser in js, some json (js) data files (à "database") - etc.

Basically a variant of how:

https://tiddlywiki.com/

works. Or:

https://chrisdiana.dev/cms.js/

In a similar vein (but not solely client hosted and managed) there's:

https://vuelog.js.org/#/page/about

https://www.gatsbyjs.org/

If all you need is a blog, it's really just a bit of navigation you need js/<some program> to help with. And you can of course add things like commenting as a SaaS that's essentially just an imported cross side scripting attack on yourself, much like with visitor tracking via Google analytics etc. See for example muut.com for comments.

Hmmm... maybe tumblelog [0]. Comes in both a Python and a Perl version (as a single script). Demo site: https://plurrrr.com/

[0] https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog

I tried a few about four years back, when I had much less web dev experience than I do today (not a professional developer). I found Jekyll to be the easiest for me. Just powerful enough to make pretty much any static site I could think of, but easy enough that even I could do it. Hosting was easy too, at the time I just FTPd everything to my provider, but I now o use rsync.

I have a site like that on Tilde Town. It's much smaller than my blogs or other sites, though, so managing links and repeating code is not that big of a deal.