The return of static site generator

I'm a maintainer of a few websites as a hobby and I'm facing a situation that their techologies are aging.

• Catz application engine based on Mojolicious was written in Perl over ten years ago
• Photo galleries use commercial jAlbum software
• Other sites are running DokuWiki and I've been using it eight years now

It is clear that in forthcoming years something must be done. Better act now.

Alternatives are

1. Use a full-blown CMS
2. Use a minimal CMS like Grav CMS
3. Write something dynamic
4. Use static site generator software like Jekyll or Hugo
5. Write my own static site generator

The basic requirements for the solutions are

• Should have a minimum of ten years of practical painless lifetime.
• Should be able to run both on Windows (workstation) and Linux (workstation, server).
• I have written web content starting from 1994. This should be the last time I need to convert the content into a new format. In future the web frontend changes shouldn't required a massive content format conversion.
• …

The solution should be able to handle

• first the basic wiki-like content and its navigation
• second a little more complex site involving data processing
• then photo galleries
• and finally static version of catza.net after the practical lifetime of the technologies behind catza.net end

Static site generators have made a comeback. Using a static site generator would close the circle since I used to use a custom static site generator srcipt written in Perl from 2004 to 2011.

to be continued