Here’s why I like dynamic sites so much:
* Easy search forms
* Same but for contact forms
* I can accept, process and send webmentions, just like that
* I can manipulate images, right there on the server
All without the need for JavaScript trickery or third-party services. All on a dead-simple, €5/month shared hosting account.
And I still can contact third-party services, like weather or location APIs, and cache responses in a database or wherever, and provide robust fallbacks.
@jan With the exception for the paragraph on JavaScript and monthly cost, there was a time when people got excited about those very things. But that was for different reasons based on a different recent history. :)
@jan yeah most of these are all things I miss after going static
(I can of course also parse RSS, accept and handle other HTTP requests, and run pretty much anything PHP supports. Or your language of choice, though I think PHP is pretty much a given on any cheap web host. And I can *still* cache most pages to static HTML, so that visitors don’t have to suffer.)