> So... if I don’t use any templating system, how do I update my header, footer or nav? Well, simply by using the ”Replace in files” feature of any good text editor. They don’t need frequent updates anyway. The benefits of using a templating system is not worth the cost of introducing the tooling it requires.
>The benefits of using a templating system is not worth the cost of introducing the tooling it requires.
Other people use static site generation, you use search and replace in your editor - not much of difference. Your approach is slower in long term, but with your on average 1 article per year it will take some time until you reach the threshold.
Eh, I don't think a person can ever write enough articles and rewrite their layout enough times that search+replace overhead ends up bigger than the upfront time it takes to read jekyll/hugo/whatever docs (plus debugging idiosyncrasies, etc). And even if search and replace was slower overall, you might be looking at a difference of minutes over a period of decades (i.e. it wouldn't actually matter in any practical sense).
Far too often I see people spend days to save 2 seconds (and then proceed to not realize the savings over a long enough timespan)
In reality the time saved isn't the only significant factor
though, humans aren't machines after all. I'll gladly "waste" a
bit more time if that time makes the process more enjoyable in
the end.
You forgot to mention the main benefits! Your website does not fingerprint my device, nor present me with a dark pattern infested "do you want us to send your data to 50 ad networks" popup.
"Tooling" can mean many different things, it can be an over-engineered flow including a dozen of different tools, or it can be a few custom made scripts to glue together html for you... but anyway, it's one time setup, you invest 2 hours of your life once and if done right it can happily run your site for decades, plus if you did it before it's no brainer usually... hell, I even have some old wordpress sites that I haven't touched in 10+ years and they autoupdate and work just fine, even make a few bucks here and there (but it certainly helps a lot if one knows what they're doing when making the sites).
> So... if I don’t use any templating system, how do I update my header, footer or nav? Well, simply by using the ”Replace in files” feature of any good text editor. They don’t need frequent updates anyway. The benefits of using a templating system is not worth the cost of introducing the tooling it requires.