Simple websites are better than beautiful ones. I'll repeat that for the folks in the back. Simple websites are better than beautiful ones. Let me be clear what I mean by a simple website. I don't mean a Wordpress site with a minimalist theme. I also don't mean a Substack …
I’m a fan of Pelican for static blog generation from Markdown files. Separating template and content into CSS/HTML and md files, and having it all in a Git repo for version control, is only a few hundreds of kilobytes. Lightweight to work on, and lightweight to deploy. It’s so uncomplicated, I can probably pick right back up if I left it alone for ten years.
I’ve found GetSimple to have similar advantages. It’s not as much a “static” site generator, but it uses flat XML storage for content instead of a database, so I can back it up in a git repo and deploy by just copying files.