The best CMS is the filesystem. Don't be afraid to just write HTML and use it.
For my personal site I write html posts as discrete files with filenames that allow me to use bash to cat them easily into pages. Then every time I write a new post for the blog I just run something like, ls -v 2019-*.html | tac | xargs cat > blog-2019.html
To style the raw posts themselves I use HTTP header linked CSS (https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/present/styles.html#h-14.6). It doesn't work in every browser but I don't care about every browser. That's the joy of personal sites. You can just do what you want.
For generating the RSS feed I wrote a small perl script. Everything is hosted from home with nginx running on my main desktop over a cable ISP connection.
I have a server-side CMS written entirely in bash. It was originally kind of a joke, but it's been working well on a relatively high-traffic site for over 5 years now so I guess the joke is now on me. I named it SCMS, which was originally "stupid CMS", but maybe now I can retcon it to "shell CMS".
We now have come the full circle, and I expect that people now - after rediscovering plain html - will next start to rediscover all the issues with maintaining purely static html sites, all those reasons why we ditched the idea back in 90s
If you are interested in learning about software, making your own SSG is a fun and simple project. If you don’t know HTML, handwriting a couple of pages is a great way to learn. If you want to make a website, writing by hand is a total waste of time.
Oh? So my niche technical website that gets a couple thousand uniques per day has all been a waste of time? Who knew that just concentrating on content instead of wasting all my time on tools and appearance was in fact the opposite of what it seemed...
Writing a bash script and sending CSS as headers(!) is a huge and unnecessary waste of time compared to learning how to use Hugo, yes. Learning Hugo takes less than one business day. If your system works for you great, but you are not being time efficient.
If you really want the low-tech version I'd still recommend writing in Markdown and using Pandoc to convert to HTML. You can then use one HTML template to style all of your blog and a Makefile for the conversion and you got your static site generator.
I mostly do Tor onion sites. So I absolutely don't want any scripting. Because that would piss off the most valuable part of my potential audience. And given Tor's latency, you want to avoid unnecessary traffic.
I write mostly in ReText. It generates decent HTML. But I usually end up tweaking.
For my personal site I write html posts as discrete files with filenames that allow me to use bash to cat them easily into pages. Then every time I write a new post for the blog I just run something like, ls -v 2019-*.html | tac | xargs cat > blog-2019.html
To style the raw posts themselves I use HTTP header linked CSS (https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/present/styles.html#h-14.6). It doesn't work in every browser but I don't care about every browser. That's the joy of personal sites. You can just do what you want.
For generating the RSS feed I wrote a small perl script. Everything is hosted from home with nginx running on my main desktop over a cable ISP connection.