Yeah, true - but I think the opportunity is a really tight integration with a mailing list. I think personal sites need some dynamic content - such as posts and a mailing list. Otherwise, they just feel stale.
That's what prompted me to start Postcard. I had a blog set up, and I wanted an integrated mailing list. It took XML hacking (RSS), $30/month to Convertkit, and lots of complexity to make it "just work". I wanted something far simpler, and built for people instead of marketing organizations.
If you use Sendfox, then all you have to do is drop your site’s RSS feed (auto-generated by WordPress, Ghost and other non-dev friendly solutions) in and it will automatically generate emails for you.
Best of all, Sendfox costs a tiny fraction of what ConvertKit does and it’s run by a more technical team.
What’s a decent static site generator for this sort of thing today? I’m envisioning a directory of .md’s or whatever, then I run make, and it invokes a thing that builds a tree of .html with an rss feed in it.
Why not build it yourself ? You'll probably spend more time tweaking template anyway. Plus, if you do it yourself you won't need anybody to maintain it.
I just use Gulp and PostHTML to render markdown, do some light templating. It does nothing more than put HTML files in a build folder. These tools never change so it's been pretty reliable.
I found myself forgetting how static site generators work, and barely used any features. I update my site like once a year.
Idk its in the JS ecosystem so HN will probably hate it lol.
That doesn't sound very boring. That sounds like it has several unnecessary moving parts. Makefiles (and the binaries they run to actually do all the heavy lifting) tend to be more fragile and less portable than their advocates let on. I often come across repos where I don't/can't trust the Makefile finish to completion without error, so I end up cracking it open to see what it's trying to do and then just running those commands manually.
People also inevitably end up forgetting how to use their static site generator setup. (Even in your "boring" example with "just" make, you will perhaps forget the templating language.) A ripe case fit for field study: <https://web.archive.org/web/20210331182731/https://corythebo...>
> So, time to update the website, but the first wall I hit was that I: ¶1. Forgot how my over-engineered SaaS was supposed to be used (no documentation because I built it myself and was lazy) ¶2. Forgot how to follow the esoteric Hugo conventions (has documentation, but it's not easy to parse at a glance)
> I was pretty annoyed with myself for having fallen for the trap of not documenting my own systems, but not sure how I could have remembered all of the Hugo-isms, especially since I don't update this site very often and don't do static site generator work outside of this.
If think you want to use a static site generator, first try just making your site capable of self-replication. Write a document that lists all the transformation steps that should be applied to the input in order to produce the desired output, save that as something like makesite.html, dump it somewhere on your site, and have it so that when you drag and drop the directory containing your site sources onto the page, then it spits the publishable version back out. (Just make it so that your makesite.html is written for a dumb enough audience that your computer (read: Web browser) can follow the steps on its own.)
Alternatively, don't use a static site generator. Adopt a regimen where the publishable representation (what would be the SSG's output) is also the canonical representation (i.e. "source").
That's what prompted me to start Postcard. I had a blog set up, and I wanted an integrated mailing list. It took XML hacking (RSS), $30/month to Convertkit, and lots of complexity to make it "just work". I wanted something far simpler, and built for people instead of marketing organizations.