My Recent goal. Minimize the amount of infrastructure in building a small website (i.e only use static HTML pages), and still incorporate dynamic content such as news and events in the web page.

Feed2JS is an invaluable tool for achieving this (at least the news and events part). You can embed an RSS feed into your web page with a tiny bit of HTML code (a script tag). Likely this RSS feed would go to a blog of sorts (easy to set up on any service).

You now have a web page with updated news and events, but doesn’t require any infrastructure (e.g. database or scripts).