[jaw]

I use a sort of intermediate approach for my personal site. It's just stored as html files in a git repo, and I do write the html by hand for pages that I want to put extra love into (e.g. an annual year-in-review post to share with family and friends). You wrote something in your original "Writing my own damn HTML" post that captures a big part of why this appeals to me: "I see my website as a sort of self-expression project - kind of like a zen garden..."

But handcrafting html is inconvenient to do frequently, so for more ordinary posts I write in markdown and use some custom scripts and pandoc to generate html. For me this approach is more fun than using a static site generator and less annoying (because I spend less time figuring out why an upgrade randomly broke something, or how to make the SSG do things I already know how to do manually). But the only reason it hasn't devolved into a full hand-rolled SSG is that I don't need/want much consistency across pages: there's no shared nav bar and I don't try to keep the styling or layout of older pages in line with newer pages.