Writing HTML by hand is easier than debugging your static site generator (2024)
The article discusses the challenges of using static site generators compared to writing HTML by hand. The author argues that setting up a static site generator can be cumbersome due to varying dependencies and configurations. Ultimately, the piece suggests that maintaining static HTML files may be a simpler and more reliable approach for long-term site management.
- ▪Setting up a static site generator on a new machine can lead to issues due to differing configurations.
- ▪Debugging programming language installations and their package ecosystems adds complexity to using static site generators.
- ▪Maintaining a website as a folder of HTML files allows for easier setup and management.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | the logic grimoire |
| Canonical URL | https://logicgrimoire.wordpress.com/2024/07/01/writing-html-by-hand-is-easier-than-debugging-your-static-site-generator/ |
| Publication time | Sat, 23 May 2026 14:21:29 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-23T14:37:27.193Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-23T14:37:27.193Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 4CMQ_fyI5ghM |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Writing HTML by hand is easier than debugging your static site generator As someone who has used a static site generator every day at work for years I am on the threshold of believing “actually just writing HTML by hand is probably easier” This becomes obvious when you eg get a new work machine and need to set up the site generator on the new machine and realize that the exact series of bits you had on disk on the old machine were different than what you can achieve on the new machine.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at the logic grimoire.
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