I also use Hugo and GitHub Pages for their simplicity. I wrote about this setup here[1].
https://www.planetjones.net/blog/03-05-2023/relaunching-my-p...
Yeah, most tools are built to support something different.
Since I host with Netlify, I've written a lightweight Netlify function that looks at my Pinboard account for changes. If there are changes, it simply re-runs the static site build. During the build, Lektor, the static site generator, runs a custom plugin I've written that generates the link blog page from the Pinboard API.
Definitely more work than it was "worth", but as a person who doesn't get to write lots of code every day, it was a blast putting it all together.
1. polling for external changes somewhere
2. updating some pages on a static site (by incorporating the changes from step 1) and rebuilding it
is incredibly powerful. It allows us to make a static site behave almost like a read-only dynamic one. There needs to be a name for this—it’s hard to discuss it without one.
[0]: https://garrido.io/notes/archiving-and-syndicating-mastodon-...
Simon Willison groked the name « Baked Data »: even though it was in the context of Datasette (which requires a backend to run but the SQLite db is embedded and read-only), it is pretty safe the term can be applied for static websites also!
Except a special-case of transclusion: high latency and compile-time only. As opposed to doing it with JS dynamically; if Pinboard had an API, or even simply doesn't block frames with HTTP headers, you could simply dynamically call from the static site page to the other site, load the relevant HTML, and present it transcluded into the static site page. (This is how Gwern.net does a lot of stuff: everything from the Wikipedia/Github popups to transcluding other pages.)
What a beautiful value to have.