So I relaunched my blog again.

@markwyner Another reason why a static site generator is good for longevity: it won't stop working, or be pulled. Sure, if people stop developing it, maybe there's a particularly annoying bug that won't get fixed, *but it will keep working just the same way as earlier*. It's possible to download and keep a copy of the software, and to run that locally. And a bug might mean you can't do something you'd like to do, but (hopefully not jinxing it, now) won't ever introduce any kind of vulnerability.

When I migrated my own site to be a static site, I did initially look at a handful of alternatives. Hugo was one. I passed rather hard on that because, sure, it might be possible to stop it from doing that, but it *really really really wanted* to pull stuff from the Internet into the web site during the site build process. Which for me meant that besides offline builds at best being non-standard, I can't be sure builds are idempotent. Which were pretty strong requirements for me.

@markwyner

@mkj that’s weird about Hugo. I looked at it, but passed form some reason that I can’t recall. Maybe because I don’t know anything about Go.

I have been using Middleman for as long as I can remember. Just for regular sites. But I don’t like their blog setup. And there was a bug with something I wanted to do. So that’s how I landed with Jekyll. Which is working great so far.

@markwyner Whichever tool you prefer. Seriously. And like I said, maybe there was a way to make it not do that, but I ended up with Pelican myself which is plenty happy to work completely offline. (For installation, I just used the Debian package.)

As you said, switching to a different SSG would likely be little more than configuration. The page template(s) would probably need a remake, but all the content should port with minimal difficulty, which is the important part.