A basic blog can obviously be built using a simple DB-backed server side framework. The original blogs were basically designed almost entirely around the capabi

A basic blog can obviously be built using a simple DB-backed server side framework. The original blogs were basically designed almost entirely around the capabilities that were easy to accomplish with that architecture - you can practically read off the underlying relational table structure of Dave Winer’s blog from the RSS spec. As you render each page serverside you just SELECT in the blog content, the index links, the tag cloud, etc. But it has to be said (speaking as someone who has implemented this a few times) comments were always the tricky bit. You’re right that SSR/pregeneration approaches are a reasonable modern approach to building a simple blog, but still comments are an annoying obstacle to a simple pregenerated page model. And I’ve got to say: it for sure gets a lot more complex when what you’re building isn’t a blog but a blogging platform. I’m absolutely not arguing that such a system shouldn’t serve up relatively simple prerendered HTML for article pages by the way - I mean, basic SEO kind of pushes you to do that - but that the rest of the stuff on that blog - the tag clouds and the comments and so on - are actually easier to add through clientside JavaScript integration of simple backend services, than through adding complexity to your serverside HTML generation model.