Is there a static site generator out there that doesn't require a ridiculous build process every time I do an update?
Inevitably, when a new "hot" SSG comes on the scene, I try it, and then go back to compare it to the old "hot" SSG from 2 years ago. Yet, I can never get the old test site I set up running again without massive annoyances. This has happened multiple times.
As far as I'm concerned, there's zero reason your landing pages and blog should require 3,000 dependencies to run.
And like all SSGs, I see no mention of sane SEO defaults on the homepage. Let me guess--with Astro I'm going to have to set all of this up myself?
I am experimenting with Caddy's template functionality [0] in my pursuit of making dependency-free and buildless websites. Caddy's templates are inspired by the Server Side Include (SSI) functionality in Apache and Nginx, except it uses Golang's syntax. I have made several websites in Hugo and find it pleasantly similar, only more bear-bones.
Although Caddy is serving static sites to the browser, it is technically more like using a dynamic scripting language like PHP on the server. I guess Caddy templates outperform PHP by a large margin because it is written in Golang and compiled, but I have never tested this hypothesis.
Funfact: Caddy's entire website is written with Caddy's template system and the source code is available [1] for those who want to take a look!
[0] https://caddyserver.com/docs/modules/http.handlers.templates