This looks very non-simplistic in all the wrong ways.
Not to say I haven't been down this path[1]; it's only after you give up and do the simplest thing possible that takes the least amount of time and knowledge that you realise how much time and effort you burned learning tools you will never use again.
There are two questions to ask when making your blog post:
1. What is the most important question that I want to answer in this post?
2. Why do I need to learn these other technologies to answer that question?
[1]"I just want a simple blog, lemme use plain html" ... 10 months pass ... "It would be nice to have a pro-looking thing with a contact form and comment box on each blog post, so lets use wordpress" ... 3 years pass ... "Comment boxes are overrated, all I'm getting is spam. I know, I can use emacs org-mode and export to HTML; I'm already using emacs for everything else!" ... 2 years pass ... "Org mode output just not flexible enough, even though I've beaten it into submission to do javascript, navigation, and auto-posts to reddit, HN, etc."
I am now at the point where I have a small shall script that runs pandoc on a markdown file. I don't think I'll ever change from this: markdown is damn quick to type, the flexibility of HTML, CSS and Javascript is there when I need it and I don't need buttons for HN, reddit, nor a comment form for each post.
So, honestly, just use markdown and a generator for your blog. Using anything that requires more knowledge than that results in less compelling blog posts, because you're focused on the wrong thing.
For blogs, I agree. And this is the solution I arrived at, just write markdown files, and have Caddy serve them as HTML without any setup.
But I mainly write presentation webpages for apps, people, events etc. and that's what all this article was about. A templating language is a godsend for that.
Not to say I haven't been down this path[1]; it's only after you give up and do the simplest thing possible that takes the least amount of time and knowledge that you realise how much time and effort you burned learning tools you will never use again.
There are two questions to ask when making your blog post:
1. What is the most important question that I want to answer in this post?
2. Why do I need to learn these other technologies to answer that question?
[1]"I just want a simple blog, lemme use plain html" ... 10 months pass ... "It would be nice to have a pro-looking thing with a contact form and comment box on each blog post, so lets use wordpress" ... 3 years pass ... "Comment boxes are overrated, all I'm getting is spam. I know, I can use emacs org-mode and export to HTML; I'm already using emacs for everything else!" ... 2 years pass ... "Org mode output just not flexible enough, even though I've beaten it into submission to do javascript, navigation, and auto-posts to reddit, HN, etc."
I am now at the point where I have a small shall script that runs pandoc on a markdown file. I don't think I'll ever change from this: markdown is damn quick to type, the flexibility of HTML, CSS and Javascript is there when I need it and I don't need buttons for HN, reddit, nor a comment form for each post.
So, honestly, just use markdown and a generator for your blog. Using anything that requires more knowledge than that results in less compelling blog posts, because you're focused on the wrong thing.