static site generators

I am, once again, trying to learn how to use a Static Site Generator, or SSG.

I've mentioned that I'm feeling a bit restless with my site, which I've got working exactly the way I want it to and which has thus failed to provide me with something to do. So I thought I'd go and try for maybe the fourth or fifth time to get a SSG to please me.

This is, I believe, the second or possibly the third time I've tried to make Eleventy specifically work, and I got further this time than I did last time. Far enough to realize that I am simply unlikely to ever enjoy working with SSGs.

I don't like prebuilt systems like WordPress because they're not flexible enough for my tastes (and also, let's be real, because I'm cheap). I also recognize the downside of coding, which is that it takes a bunch of non-money resources—I have to teach myself to do whatever it is I want to do, and then I have to wrap my head around it, and then I have to actually do it, and all of that takes a good deal of time and effort. Given the choice, I pick the coding.

SSGs are kind of the worst of both worlds for me. If you want to use them straight out of the box, they're already less convenient than something like WordPress (though they are free). If you want to mess around with them, they're at least as annoying as any coding language I've learned to date, and frequently much more so. I'm going to be honest: I taught myself both Python and JavaScript and neither of them held a candle to any SSG I've tried in terms of sheer capacity for frustration. I think trying to learn Astro is the most I've cried over any subject since Calc III.

Eleventy is much better, but it's still not fun for me. Coding my site in HTML/CSS/JS is fun—I'm using more JS that I'd like by a long mile, but given that this is a personal site and nobody's grading me for style, I'll take it.

I'm going to keep going with Eleventy, just to have another skill under my belt, but I find it unlikely that I'll ever really use it, or any other SSG. I really think they're just not for me.