Personal, but I’d rather learn and own a process.

1. Learn how you can get HTML generated from a human-readable and writer-friendly format, say, Markdown (plain-text). This can be Pandoc, a macOS/Win wrapper desktop UI over Pandoc, and many other tools that do this.

2. Learn the process (and the tools) to upload, or sync to a service that hosts the HTML (CSS+JS).

3. Learn the simple steps of owning of a domain, and updating the DNS to point to the right services, such as Github Pages, CloudFlare Pages, etc.

As you are not dependent on a particular tool/service/platform/company, you can walk out and host your files (the website content) elsewhere.

The post-processing of the raw (Markdown) articles/posts to HTML can be then automated with Static Site Generator if someone is willing to learn a little more on top of the above steps.

Of course, it is a fun and good thing to know HTML but that should be optional to the target of “Run your own website 100% independently.” With Github and Cloudfalre, you can hve it for $0 monthly. If they go kaput or stops free, someone will come up - walk out and walk in elsewhere.

From the article:

> When your posts are individual HTML files (not Markdown files or database entries), they can finally be seen as the individual web pages that they truly are. And that means that you can really lean into making all of your posts unique! They don’t all have to be cookie-cutter paper-doll clones of one another; that’s just a bi-product of modern web publishing tools and the cultural influence that they have on our concept of a “blog”. You can now go ahead and make every blog post as special and individual as you’d like. Each post can have its own personality, baked right into its HTML. Individual style, individual appearance, even individual layout. Literally everything is possible with this approach.

I have to push against this slightly.

HTML is human-readable and writer friendly. Humans - not even all of them CS students - were reading HTML,JS and CSS on websites and writing it all by hand in text editors for years before the "proper tooling" came along. It really isn't that difficult, especially if you're just dealing with simple websites, doubly so if you're on HN, you probably work with more complex languages on a regular basis.

If you really want to "learn and own a process" and be "100% independent" you should at least be able to understand and work with web languages natively.

Static site generators are nice (I use Nikola) and tools make things easier but but it's still dependency on third party tools if you don't understand or can't otherwise work with the output.