2025-04-24
When I started working on this homepage on tilde, I wrote the HTML myself. This worked for a time, but proved to be cumbersome. And furthermore, I wanted to publish the content on Gopher, too. So I looked into static website generators and found lots of them.
The most popular choice seems to be Hugo. I tried it, but did not like it. Hugo hides what it’s doing by a lot of layers of complexity. It includes features that I do not need, e.g. a webserver and an auto-rebuild function, which is really a wasted effort when entr exists.
Then I tried webgen, and what I liked about it is that it hides nothing. The base template is really easy to adapt, it is very fast and easy to use.
The getting started guide shows you everything you actually need to get started. Compare that to hugos quick guide, which conveniently does not mention how to adapt the theme.
Furthermore, I find it weird that Hugo themes are so many files, and 90% of theme seem to be catered to bloggers.