bgrohman

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for years now. It’s great. I probably use the !g fallback to Google a few times a year.

I switched to FastMail about 6 months ago, and I like it. I actually like FastMail’s webapp more than Gmail’s. There aren’t any features from Gmail that I miss, and FastMail offers a very easy option to migrate your emails from Gmail.

Writing your own can be a good way to learn a new language as well as a good introduction to html/css if you’re new to it. Also, if you write it yourself (again, for _simple_ use cases), it’ll do exactly what you need and no more. Evidently, a lot of people have found reasons to write their own, including the author of this one - hence the proliferation of simple static site generators.

Yes, indeed. My original thought was more along the lines of why there are so many generators published to solve the same problem when it’s easy to create your own custom generator as needed. Add one more step - publish your custom generator online in case it’s useful for others - and now you see the proliferation. Makes perfect sense now :)

Yeah, you’re right - I forgot about Dreamweaver and similar tools. I do think that adding wysiwyg UIs to a generator puts it in a slightly different class than the type of generator posted here, but your point is a good one. Adding a UI to a simple generator would make it much easier for non-technical people to use.

Yep, thanks, I realized that eventually :)

Thanks for the thoughtful reply.

It makes sense that the static site generators with lots of bells an whistles are harder to get right, especially if they’re trying to build an ecosystem with plugins and themes where others can contribute. I’m considering the _simple_ generators like the one posted here, though. My original thought/question was why not just write your own if you have a simple use case? There have been some good answers here such as no programming knowledge, lack of experience with html/css, or wanting to spend your time on other projects.

Gotcha, makes sense. My question seems a little short-sighted in retrospect :)

Hi, thanks, that all makes sense. I was asking why there are so many static site generators and why you wouldn’t just create a custom static site generator yourself, not why you would use one. I use one myself. Based on some of the other replies, I can see that there are use cases for not creating your own - when you aren’t a programmer, or when you don’t know or care to learn html and css, or when an existing generator already does all that you need.

Gotcha, that makes sense. I hadn’t considered programmers who don’t know html/css and don’t care to learn it.

Cool, thanks for the reply. Good to know you have plenty of options.