# New SSG, Broken Links

2025-02-13T00:00:00-08:00

I have been on a static site generator discovery journey, testing many different projects to see which one worked for me. The list below isn’t complete, but they are the projects I looked into the most.

- BashBlog
- Gozer
- Hugo
- Roman Zolotarev’s SSG
- Zola

Hugo and Gozer are the two that I spent the most time on, working my site’s content into fitting the requirements of these programs. It is possible that might be why I struggle sticking to most static site generators. I’m spending a lot of time trying to figure out how these projects want to build my site, and I feel less like it is my site. I like it when my site is weird and quirky and kind of broken, those are the types of sites that I like to discover.

I was considering going to back to manually writing all the HTML and RSS XML myself, and that option is still rolling around in my head, but I did come across another site generator to play around with. Pblog is a shell script utilizing Pandoc to convert Markdown files into HTML, like the other SSGs. I had tried writing my own script last year doing exactly this, but I was struggling with the logic and didn’t even know where to start with RSS XML generation. I’m now able to build an ugly personal site closer to what I want, while automating and standardizing the extra stuff like headers, navigation, footers, feed generation, etc.

I was also running into weird bugs with Gozer where it sometimes wouldn’t create a page in one run, but would in the next run, with nothing different between the two runs. I am able to troubleshoot shell scripts much more easily than Go programs.

Of course there are hiccoughs with implementing a new tool, in this case, I am breaking all of the note and blog post URLs yet again. I can understand the argument for maintaining URL history to prevent linkrot, but I personally don’t actually care about that. Nothing lasts forever, everything is ephemeral, and I would rather tinker with my site and break some links, then worry about keeping every URL perfectly captured forever. That said, if I don’t stick with Pblog, then the current state of my site will be closer to it’s future state when I go back to manually writing out the HTML and XML.

You can check out my website source here. And if you would like, you can send me your thoughts to my email or Mastodon.