I'm gunna be honest: I'm in this court ("why?" "what problem does this solve?") with, well, the whole SSG thing.
I get why people want to write their content in Markdown (well, specifically, I get why tech people want to write their content in Markdown, but not normal humans who almost always want a WYSIWYG) - but what I just can't get my head around is the vast complexity that almost all these tools seem to bring to the table.
I've looked at it for so long now I think I've basically got a terrible mental block - for most scenarios, I just don't get it. I don't see what the problem is that is being solved. Booting up a bunch of HTML files, or a simple WordPress site, or a manually built PHP thing that pulls Markdown files and uses a couple of includes to solve the "how do we replicate menus?" question - this makes sense to me.
I'm not talking about this tool (like you I have no idea what it actually does) but the whole Hugo/Gatsby/Jekyll/etc thing. Having (what looks like!) a steep learning curve, then a whole bunch of build steps, lots of dependencies, frameworks, templates etc etc - in order to get what is being sold here as the end game (a fast, dependency free, "just html", no risk website) just feels like ...madness.
I badly need someone to explain to me why all these tools are doing something better. That's a serious request, btw, would love for someone to enlighten me!
I get why people want to write their content in Markdown (well, specifically, I get why tech people want to write their content in Markdown, but not normal humans who almost always want a WYSIWYG) - but what I just can't get my head around is the vast complexity that almost all these tools seem to bring to the table.
I've looked at it for so long now I think I've basically got a terrible mental block - for most scenarios, I just don't get it. I don't see what the problem is that is being solved. Booting up a bunch of HTML files, or a simple WordPress site, or a manually built PHP thing that pulls Markdown files and uses a couple of includes to solve the "how do we replicate menus?" question - this makes sense to me.
I'm not talking about this tool (like you I have no idea what it actually does) but the whole Hugo/Gatsby/Jekyll/etc thing. Having (what looks like!) a steep learning curve, then a whole bunch of build steps, lots of dependencies, frameworks, templates etc etc - in order to get what is being sold here as the end game (a fast, dependency free, "just html", no risk website) just feels like ...madness.
I badly need someone to explain to me why all these tools are doing something better. That's a serious request, btw, would love for someone to enlighten me!