No need for a SSG. Just copy something like this: https://thebestmotherfucking.website and make every page by hand like you are some 80 year old greybeard.
For what most people are doing with static site generators (blogging) going "raw" HTML is honestly not a bad choice. Most usage of Markdown is just to avoid writing tags. It's not a whole lot more work to write `<em>foo</em>` instead of `_foo_`.
HTML was meant to be hand-authored, not a compilation target. It's like if people forgot you can still cook rice without a rice cooker.
Yeah, I got fed up with all the dependencies and processes and workflows and configurations and just manually made my site like it's 2004, just hand-written HTML+CSS+JS. As long as it's a small personal site, this is very robust and there is no constant churn and deprecations and change for the sake of change.
I have a couple of 100% handwritten sites as well. The challenge is when they go beyond about a dozen pages. If you want to change something across pages that isn't a find & replace, like adding a meta tag, it starts to be a drag. I'm going to be converting one of those sites to Swift Publish soon, as it's a low-dependency framework that hasn't been updated in years.
Sure, but many people just want to have a super basic academic site with like 1 or 2 pages ("simple minimalist academic-like website" as it was phrased upthread), and then start to fiddle with a million frameworks and the compilation chain is broken in a few months when you want to add your new publication to the site, and you have to dig through versions and dependencies and environments and CI/CD and whatnot. When you could just type up your site in one afternoon by hand and it will keep working indefinitely.
I experimented with customizing a flat page by writing HTML and CSS manually, with some help from LLMs. Using this approach, it’s possible to create something resembling the website you linked.
The result is decent, though the organization of the long page could be improved. In my view, a good personal website would include space for a photo, name, and affiliation, along with a simple menu for sections like biography, publication, projects, with a professional style (font and colors), but no more complex.
The publication page could have a style for presenting papers in a clean well-formatted list. That may require a theme that comes with a layout and a degree of customization and novelty.
A lot of themes I looked into are not quite professional.
