[mrpotato]

Just like a bunch of us here, I also wrote an SSG.

I setup a cronjob to fetch weather data and run the SSG to parse the XML and render a weather "website" on my VPS.

But for the blogs I've had/have, I just use a pre-existing one (zola). There are hundreds of SSGs out there, why bother building yet another one if one already exists for transforming your preferred base doc (markdown, asciidoc, morse code, etc)

[_xivi]

> There are hundreds of SSGs out there, why bother building yet another one if one already exists for

It's really not that rosy tbf. I went through something like: SvelteKit, 11ty, Astro, Zola, hugo, and possibly others in-between.

It's pretty easy to develop a preference where none of the mainstream SSGs fare well at. Some established large SSGs might do X but they have their own challenges too.

You start migrating by filtering based on some criteria, and find a match that does a great job initially, only to get bitten later, when you've migrated and settled and start seeing the cracks.

For example, Zola, and many others, doesn't support asciidoc. The handful that do have their own problems too. (I'm now with hugo which support asciidoc but I'm still determined to build my own ssg)

It's not fantasizing about the perfect tool, as much as developing a setup where you're comfortable and happy. Especially in the case of SSG, where you're more exposed to the internals and by extension any errors/problems.

[schemescape]

The most commonly missing SSG feature for me is being able to transform relative links between Markdown files (which VS Code happily auto-completes for me) into relative links between the resulting HTML files.

Similarly hard to find is tagging posts based on file system metadata (e.g. everything in “posts/linux/“ should be tagged with “linux”).