I love Astro. It is so extensive to your liking and if you want to have complex interactive stuff at some point, you can just add a framework of your liking (react, vue, svelte, etc) and it will still work wonders. It doesn't abstract that much, and yet provides a nice UX and performance is top notch, which is why I love it so much. You can do from the most simplest website and blog on it, to the most complex content driven websites. I use it for so many different things, both hobbyist and professionally.

I'm going to push back against Astro because all the server island stuff is over-engineered for a blog, while in the meantime Astro is not designed for more complex sites so I'm not sure what it's purpose is really.

I would say that in the era of agentic coding you don't need any framework. Just a backend + router + markdown generator. I use Hono + Tanstack router for the first two. Tell any decent LLM to wire those up for you and you'll have a simple static site ready to go in an hour or two.

I use Hugo for one blog [1] and Zola for another [2], I think they're both pretty simple to use once you wrap your mind around how they structure things.

Astro is also great (as others have noted) esp if you want to leverage the JS ecosystem at large.

[1] https://frominsidethebox.com

[2] https://yakshed.com

Astro https://astro.build/

I'm on Hugo. It's simple, capable, well documented, LLMs understand it well, and I don't have to touch the JS ecosystem. My previous setup was with a Node based SSG and it broke on literally every update and had a hundred dependencies.

Astro is fantastic.

https://astro.build/

So many great options. I always opt for Web Origami though.

It is more like a dialect of JavaScript optimised for developing static sites than a static site generator in and of itself. It has lots of 'builtins' for things like RSS and converting Markdown to HTML. It is so wonderfully flexible and doesn't lock you into a specific site structure like others SSGs do.

https://weborigami.org/

Not sure about the best, but Zola is good enough for basic blogging needs. I liked the part that it was a single binary, so you don’t have to keep up with any breaking changes unless you want a new feature or a bug is bothering you.

Whatever you use, I feel it is tradition to have 3 odd blog posts about journey of building a SSG of your own since nothing else matched exactly what you needed and that’s it. Then you should forget that blog ever existed.

I'm using tanstack+tailwind and Ai to write a few scripts for doing what static generators would do. Keep it simple, make it unique, bring back the weird

I made QIP Router where every part of rendering and making the HTTP response is customizable via WebAssembly. You often have a lot more control than a traditional static site generator that requires a particular plugin made — just make your own!

https://qip.dev/docs/router

I love using hugo. Also wrote about some time ago how I got a perfect 100/100 Lighthouse score with Hugo and plain CSS. Feel free to have a look: https://philippdubach.com/posts/hugo-lighthouse-100/

I've been using Astro for my main blog and have been reasonably happy with it, but recently branched out for my Lab site to be just a simple static hub built with Vite/TypeScript/Tailwind, where each project subpage is bundled in its own slug folder so they can bring in additional dependencies.

I created a static blog framework called Amytis: https://github.com/hutusi/amytis and I'm really excited for you to give it a try.

I like Zola. It is opinionated, but easy to pick up and get running in an hour or so. Not so great if you are working on a large website with lots of interconnected pages, but perfect for a blog, personal, or small company website.

I use Zine [1]. its inspired from Hugo, written in Zig. but probably not the "best" for some use cases.

[1] https://zine-ssg.io

I tried Eleventy for building a simple product website and really liked it. Not quite sure about the future with the acquisition/rebranding.

ai. like have them take your language of choice, your templating of choice, your architecture of choice etc and spit out something. they've seen enough that it can pretty much oneshot something relatively simple.

edit: i mean have the ai write the generator, don't use it to actually generate pages...