---
title: 'New SSG, Broken Links'
date: 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](https://github.com/cfenollosa/bashblog)
* [Gozer](https://git.sr.ht/~dvko/gozer)
* [Hugo](https://gohugo.io)
* [Roman Zolotarev's SSG](https://romanzolotarev.com/ssg.html)
* [Zola](https://www.getzola.org)

Hugo and Gozer are the two that I actually worked my site's content into fitting and I guess 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](https://pblog.btxx.org/) is a shell script utilizing [Pandoc](https://pandoc.org/) 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](https://git.0x212.com/iiogama/homepage).  And if you would like, you can send me your thoughts to [my email](mailto:iiogama@0x212.com) or [Mastodon](https://0x212.com/@iiogama).