In defence of the boring web
"Boring" is nice although my experience with Hugo is that it takes a nontrivial amount of effort to get it working in the first place, such that I couldn't use it for putting project documentation on github.io and <i>definitely</i> wouldn't call it "boring" in the sense used in the article. It is definitely a more complex scheme even if that complexity is front-loaded and you get to keep everything boring on the server and the client (with the exception of MathJax, for good reasons). (Aside: consider Katex!)<p>With Hugo, I ended up fighting with themes that wouldn't render correctly, and all the mess that is shortcodes. Shortcodes are nice in theory, but there should be a larger set of "standard" shortcodes that are expected to work across most themes (some nice subset of what Bootstrap gives you) and instead of custom syntax, it seems like you should be able to use standard HTML with custom tags.<p>Anyway... my experience with Hugo made me feel that I would even have an easier time wrangling a Wordpress installation. It's equally possible to archive a Wordpress site by taking a snapshot of the HTML, and I've done it, it's just that the "boring" web (as the author puts it) moves the failure points to your personal computer, rather than the server you run your site on.