EDIT: Here’s a screenshot of what I mean by saying I’ve gone way overboard.

Wow! Impressive :)

You accidentally re-used the link to the Zola issue tracker there.

Oops, fixed.

it’ll depend on how amenable it is to checking a site rooted in a file:// URL so I don’t need the overhead and complexity of spinning up an HTTP server to check for broken links.

Wouldn’t you want your SSG to include a dev-server anyways? Zola has zola serve which even does incremental rebuilds, but something less sophisticated should be easy to add to your own (only took me a weekend to add to hinoki including rebuilds, though mostly starting the build from scratch on changes).

Hey, only saw this now! Have you investigated some of the options already now?

Re. Jekyll, I have the same experience which is what got me to try Zola. I find it rather nice to use at least when you’re okay with its limitations – which hasn’t always been the case… missing flexibility for output paths has been an annoyance. What really led me to make my own Rust SSG instead of forking Zola is that I found Zola to be quite hard to hack on, and Tera (its templating lang) to be a little buggy / much less elegant than minijinja API-wise.

Re. link checking, have you seen lychee? When I found out about it, the priority of building my own link checker in my SSG (that was only an idea at that point, I think) basically dropped to zero :D