Your post actually inspired me to want to start blogging so I will share what I'm thinking about.

Plain HTML only with a single page and hyperlinks into a specific article. Very basic styling and no JS, don't even necessarily want to have a css file, just inline in the header. Very likely just setting font family to sans and be done with it.

I sometimes play with esoteric stuff that might be fun to blog about.

Stuff I've recently played with and deployed on internal tools was a SPA built using just js. No react etc. Basic router which makes use of the history API and use the observer pattern with MVC for "components" but generally those are just entire pages.

And a "component" or "page" is just a function that takes a router (could extend it to include props I guess ala react) and returns a Promise<HTMLElement>.

All the router does is looks up the function in a map and calls it replacing the top level div on the page with the returned HTMLElement.

All external loading happens at the page level and not at component level and it's simple enough.

There's a point where you need a bigger framework like react but I find it a pain to include react and npm etc when all I need is some very simple pages with some dynamic content.

A writeup on the pros and cons etc might be fun.

The next thing I'm playing with is possibly something like a job system(well promises in JS would work fine) and using that for state updates. Think goroutines and channels. There are some existing articles on that but they reference very old libraries and I feel there might be no reason to use a library or even channels on the web for that concept.

> Plain HTML only with a single page and hyperlinks into a specific article. Very basic styling and no JS, don't even necessarily want to have a css file, just inline in the header. Very likely just setting font family to sans and be done with it.

This describes exactly how I started out. This setup held for a bit less than two years, then I went for a multi-page setup.

The first thing that I actually scripted was an RSS feed. And the with the first refactoring of the header, I went for an SSG.

If you want actually want to blog, I'd say: the best setup is whatever gets the least into the way of actually writing and hitting publish. Styling, deployment, navigation structure, JS-based routing, all cool, but only of secondary importance when your goal is writing in public.

if you want to get started writing super quick, you can also take a look at some of the super minimalist platforms that are basically as you describe - like https://bearblog.dev/ and https://mataroa.blog/.

I've stumbled on both from submissions to HN and they have become my recommendations for friends that want to write, especially the couple who are prone to jumping down technical rabbit holes & not ever getting to the writing.