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~ the machine is deeply symptomatic ~
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This Website
The build process for this website has been revised on several occassions (always with the intent of reducing dependencies and doing more with less).
Phase One
At first I was using 11ty as my static-site generator (SSG), but it all seemed like a lot of unnecessary cruft.
That's a lot of garbage for building a simple static website.
Phase Two
My first revision to this process occurred when I discovered that one can hyperlink emacs org files and export them to html with ox-publish. This worked quite nicely for a while, but the idea of using my text-editor to publish my website eventually soured. I wanted something more platform-agnostic (this turned out to be a rather prescient change since I stopped using Linux and began using OpenBSD and the mg text-editor for all of my programming).
Phase Three
My replacement for emacs + org mode was pandoc + Makefile with markdown files. This was the mainstay build-process for a few years. At some point in that time I replaced the Makefile with a shell-script that cached the files and only rebuilt them if they changed (I agree with xmdi and support the renaming of Makefiles to ‘snake-files’). This configuration is incredibly cozy. I highly recommend it to anybody whos is considering a static-site generator for their website. They probably *do not* need a full static-site generator. The script took me minutes to write and it worked wonderfully for years and I never needed to pull in another dependency (except for pandoc...which brings us to phase four...)
Phase Four
Manual pages! The OpenBSD roff (mdoc) parser (mandoc) has a flag to convert an mdoc document to html (the GNU groff tool can do this too.) This site is now a collection of man pages that are converted to a static website with a simple shell-script. The website is now completely built and deployed with tools found in a base OpenBSD install. The only negative that I have found so far is that there does not seem to be an easy way to embed images in the website output. Every image on the site is now just a link to the image, but this is a minor inconvenience.
Deployment
Deployment has been the one commonality across each iteration of build process revisions. I use rsync to sync the generated output directory with the remote website root. The site is currently hosted with prgmr on OpenBSD