I've been using the same version of Jekyll, using the same outdated, discontinued version of ruby, for more than 10y. I refuse to learn anything about ruby, or spend any time upgrading Jekyll or any of the 2 plug-ins I use, and I take a weird pride in that. It works, it generates my blog, I don't want it to do anything else. I have no idea how it works anymore. For all I know Jekyll has been abandoned. That version of ruby might be riddled with bugs and security holes, and why would I care? it's only used when I generate the website, in a docker container that doesn't talk to anything.
Eleventy might not receive new features, your website will still work.
Incidentally, also the curse, for the authors who attempt to monetize SSGs: most users prioritize control, and don't clamor for new features. A nightmare combination for *aaS peddlers.
Same here 10+ years on Jekyll, old Ruby version, zero interest in changing it. I run it in a container too. It just works. It generates HTML and HTML still works. I'll be on this setup for another 10 years.
Same here. I have multiple sites working on Jekyll for almost 10 years as well. I’ve considered moving on to other frameworks such as 11ty and tried local versions for the sake of learning and “upgrading”. But in the end Jekyll still works flawlessly and is very easy to maintain. I use a newer version of Ruby though.
Of course your point is 100% true and very valid. Have an upvote.
> For all I know Jekyll has been abandoned.
Side Note Spoiler: it's still kickin'. I try to keep my things on Debian-stable, and am the primary maintainer of about five websites managed by Jekyll. There was a Ruby 3 and it required like 20 minutes to get things working again. I wish all software required this little attention!
Ha, I had a similar story with Jekyll but my build wasn't containerised. At some point it stopped being compatible with the latest [something. Ruby? Gems? I don't care, just build my fucking HTML templates please] so I just migrated to Hugo.
I stuck around on Hugo for quite some time and I've never had any such issues yet, but now I've also wrapped the build in Nix. So yeah I'll do the same - if it ever stops working I'll just pin the build inputs at the last version that worked.
I _think_ the Hugo folks seem to understand the "just build my fucking HTML templates" principle. I.e. for most use cases the job of a static site generator is simple enough that breaking compatibility is literally never justified. So hopefully pinning won't be necessary.
Just last week updating Hugo broke my templates. That‘s happening every few months. They deprecate and then remove or rename template variables like crazy.
Yeah, I really don't understand why some developers have an extreme compulsion to constantly deprecate and rename things like this, causing massive upgrade headaches to users.
In addition to Hugo, it happens constantly in GoReleaser. In both cases, they're excellent tools, but the unending renaming spree is just awful. Weirdly, both are in the Go ecosystem, which generally values backwards compatibility.
Damn that's interesting I have not run into that at all after about 4 years.
Maybe it's just that my site is extremely dumb? I forked an "ultra minimal" theme and deleted most of its code. So perhaps I just use such a tiny subset of the template system that I haven't been affected.
I was in the same boat! I love Ruby so the language isn't an issue, but I generally do not like Jekyll. I especially find the template system very limiting. That is especially disappointing since ERB is pretty great. I wish that had been a first class feature.
I use it to generate my resume, and I went almost 10 years without updating Jekyll. Since Claude has come on the scene, I used it to upgrade everything to the latest and it was quite painless. There's something beautiful about a system that is so stable. Sinatra especially is a joy, because it has been so stable for so many years.
The thing about SSGs is that you only need a small percentage of the functionality they offer and for what: so instead of some simple syntax for links you can remember in HTML
there is something weird and irregular I always have to look up in the manual in Markdown and all sorts of other Markdown WTFs. Every time I tried to get started on a personal site with an SSG I would get depressed looking at hundreds of ugly themes, get depressed with the mysterious and crappy cloud-side build systems, get depressed with the prospect of customizing them, etc. So I'd start experimenting, never finish and come back six months to make another attempt that fails.
When I really needed a landing page that looked like it fell off a UFO I did it in Vite-React (such a joy to use semantic components, like write
Earth Day Parade Ithaca Commons
and it is a simple python script that uploads the dist files to S3 (no "WTF went wrong with the github action") invalidates Cloudfront [1], extracts metadata, maintains the metadata database. There's a clear path to extending the system to do exactly what I want to do in the future unlike some SSG which I will have to relearn from scratch in six months when I want to make a big change... and had it up and running and in front of end users in a weekend.
That is, SSG has no commercial potential because any individual or organization which is capable of maintaining and customizing an SSG can create one from scratch that does exactly what they need with less cost and effort and success is only possible through hypnotizing people into thinking otherwise -- in many fields of software this happens every day but I think not SSG, like those people are going to stay asleep and dream of Drupal and Wordpress.
[1] ... and if I want to move to some similar platform I just implement it instead of struggle with "plugins" and "modules" and other overcomplicated extension mechanisms
https://soupault.net/ is about using plain HTML, but doing index pages, RSS feeds and so on from that. You even get away with not having frontmatter, because CSS like selectors allow those meta pages to retrieve title, date etc. from the HTML pages.
As a learning exercise, I wrote my own little SSG in ocaml, and man I forgot how nice a language it is. Tooling is still a bit rough but lots better than it used to be
You can use 11ty with plain HTML pages/posts, I believe. [1] And it doesn’t handle deployment at all. What you get is the same dist/ directory that your Python script would happily upload to S3.
This was the beauty of 11ty. It just puts together HTML files from templates, and maybe handles sitemap and RSS if you need. That will probably change now.
This. The 11ty sites that I've built (all personal sites that will only ever be edited by me) are all plain HTML, no markdown. 11ty is lovely and bare-bones and un-opinionated.
It's somewhat counterintuitive, but the added complexity leads to simpler projects that are easier to maintain long term. I have simple markdown files, and a separate, code-based conversion process that works well for me.
Also the documentation for eleventy was always confusing to me. I almost got the impression that "it's so simple, we don't have to explain it". Whereas astro's documentation is much more accesible; there were a handful of cases where there was something I wanted to do and astro had an example of exactly that. I didn't have to do guesswork, just follow the examples in the way the creators intended. Stuff like that is important.
Astro is very nice, but I kinda feel like they are adding a lot of features I don't want and will never need. It's starting to feel too fancy for SSG. My first time using it I encountered 3 separate bugs with their compiler. The fanciness has a price.
Astro is great, and easily extensible just by looking at the code and existing extensions too. Highly recommend it. Having the islands of actual react stuff is incredibly useful as well.
> Having the islands of actual react stuff is incredibly useful as well.
I've tried multiple times to come up with usecases where they are worth it, but still haven't found any. The only theoretical examples are things where you wouldn't be using Astro in thr first place, like real-time document collaboration or something.
Curious what you've found them so useful for. Besides just preferring React syntax to HTML+TS I guess? But again that seems to go against the point of using Astro.
Well I have a static site generated with Astro that includes parts that still use dynamic react stuff, for example an interactive dashboard / slideshow kind of thing and interactive widgets. The data is baked into the static site but I still wanted the rich interactivity from react in certain places. It naturally grew from an Astro project that didn't need any react stuff, so it was a logical and simple step to add it in the few places it was needed.
I've got slideshows and interactive calculators and things and it all works fine without the islands, that's the thing. LLMs will just incorrectly pattern match "interactivity = React".
Astro is great, and is what I prefer on new “static-y” projects (for more dynamic stuff, SvelteKit).
But 11ty really was so much simpler if all you need is to put together some templates, and don’t want to deal with component stuff. That said, the docs really are lacking in some parts.
SSGs versus Wordpress is surprisingly still a battle… I’m genuinely shocked at the number of sites on the Net that use Wordpress, dynamically assembling markup with PHP for every page view, risking constant hacking and stuff, when they have a total of like 7 or 100 pages, which could all be pre-rendered to HTML files in roughly 8 seconds on even a junky laptop or X-small ec2 instance. It really is okay.
For those who post regular updates on those sites, there are great and cheap WP plugins that export the whole site as static to something like FTP or S3, so you can just firewall the actual WP behind an IP restriction and host the actual public-facing site from S3/whatever.
Is there a tenable workflow for the marketing department to use a SSG over Wordpress?
- WYSIWYG editor is table stakes. The lovely folks at marketing once thought I was hacking when I ps -eaf-ed in an unresponsive Macbook.
- They "put" images in their post. They don't "upload the image and position it with CSS".
- It's the marketing department so they have to have all sorts of bells and whistles. At the very least tracking, at most some obscure integration plug-in that as an engineer I have no kind words for. Social integrations and "You may also like..." sections also come to mind.
> cheap WP plugins that export the whole site as static to something like FTP or S3, so you can just firewall the actual WP behind an IP restriction and host the actual public-facing site from S3/whatever.
Not that I have extensive WP experience but unless you can name me an actual plugin that has good street cred for being used in the wild wild west, I'm gonna say this is not as easy as you make it sound. For one you just described a very rudimentary data pipeline which someone has to support and maintain even infrequently. Also, speaking from experience, plugins don't always play nice with other plugins. I once tried to export my very basic personal site out of WP to find the footnotes all messed up (I don't know now but back then I handled footnotes with a plugin).
I think that's exactly the point where the article falls flat. There is potentially a big oppurtunity in building a SSG + CMS solution despite the past failed attempts.
Every few years I go looking for something that's not Wordpress that you could hand to a marketing department, but there is no viable alternative (that's not Drupal).
> It's the marketing department so they have to have all sorts of bells and whistles. At the very least tracking, at most some obscure integration plug-in that as an engineer I have no kind words for.
The world would be a better place if you forced the lovely marketing folks to use a SSG and you know it!
I taught several absolutely non-technical people to edit the content of Jekyll websites we maintain together. I made them GitHub accounts, taught them the basics of Markdown, and said that if they break anything I can fix it easily, so they shouldn't worry about it. Sometimes they break things and eventually I fix it. It works great. I can only imagine the horrors I'd have to deal with if there was WYSIWYG!
Ironically, one of the original major reasons WordPress became popular was its dynamic nature. It dethroned Movable Type, which was an extremely powerful and extensible static site generator.
It's wild to me that this post's timeline makes no mention whatsoever of Movable Type, and at one point it links to another author's post titled "A Complete History of Static: The Beginning to WordPress Headless" which also makes no mention whatsoever of Movable Type. Now I feel old :/
To my surprise, Movable Type is still being developed even today. Wonder if there's some companies still using it out inertia. I know many moved off of it back when they restricted their free tier
I haven't kept up with it in recent years, but I know it remained popular in Japan for many years longer than elsewhere. AFAIK since 2011 it has been developed by a Japanese company, who acquired Six Apart's former subsidiary there, as well as the brand name.
It's also interesting that so many people in this thread are saying "What I really need is a SSG that also works as a CMS with a GUI" -- that's literally what Movable Type excelled at. Especially versions 4 and 5, which had a FOSS edition. A number of major US media sites were powered by it for years. However because it was written in Perl, that became a huge negative point as Perl fell out of use in the industry.
I started my client's site on Hugo, withing 2 days I was editing something for them every 30 mins (slight exaggeration). They wanted something they could edit, they don't do Markdown, they don't manually write URLs they want to drag images into their posts and pages.
Eleventy + Decap CMS + gitlab has been working well for our marketing team for the past 3+ years. Also, with Claude/Gemini/Copilot it is a lot easier to edit templates and add new pages when all of the files are right there on your filesystem.
Normal people refuse to learn markdown - they want RTF editor.
I could understand someone might refuse learning LaTex but markdown is so simple.
RTF editing sucks badly if you have to include it in your project. No one wants to specifically pay for implementing it but they also expect it to be there.
Nowadays you can just use one of those WYSIWYG markdown editors that come with a toolbar (incl. buttons for inserting images) and hide the formatting syntax by default.
But each editor also has its issues with generating "backend html" doing bunch of wonky stuff so it works for this editor — using that text in various other places and when you have multiple rich text fields and not single big one to edit whole document is always a major PITA.
Then you get whatever they write to PDF report so for example you have to render HTML correctly there. Amount of ways it can break is basically infinite, getting paragraphs page breaks is non trivial amount of work, especially when customer wants their own layout for the report and not generic looking or just broken layout. So problem is mix and match display of whatever they write in different places.
Not to mention, everyone wants prefilled templates, so they don't start from scratch, oh and your templates need to have dynamically filled in placeholders, now you have to put something like tags that will be updated by your back end.
Maybe you need to send it via API and all kind of companies have WAF on incoming/outgoing data then you have to strip tags.
Yes you can encode/decode, limit options, white list allowed tags, and I was doing that for years now, but amount of things that break is still big and another customer wants you to enable lists when you wanted to
support just italic, bold, then you have whole blast radius and feature creep is real.
ROI is just not there, as I mentioned no one wants to specifically pay for all that, we have a really good run telling customers to just use plain text, amount of regressions to be tested, amount of expectations of things to work out of the box once you go with rich text is really high.
Bar to jump to is basically re-implement MS Word — oh did I mention everyone will expect copy pasting from Word to work perfectly - just imagine how much time your customer support has to spend explaining you limited options in that field to be just bold and italic.
RTF editor may be part of WYSIWYG solution but it also might be used to edit text that on publication will be looking entirely differently or will be used in various places.
Ohh, I think I get it now – is this about literally using RTF as an intermediate format? I really don’t think I’ve heard about it being used in the context of static sites, but I see how it might make sense as a way of storing, well, rich text.
This is generally solvable unless they wanted radical layout changes. There are headless CMS solutions, just ensure that no texts are hardcoded and instead put in a config. Such configs can be made editable in the CMS.
I recently moved all my website from WordPress.
In last few year couple of them had got hacked via plugin exploits as well. I had to use "security" plugins after that i didn't have any issue but still...
I crawled own website and downloaded each, and converted to markdown then used static site generator (custom in javascript)
runs on cloudflare pages for free with no downtimes or "fee".
> I’m genuinely shocked at the number of sites on the Net that use Wordpress, dynamically assembling markup with PHP for every page view,
What puzzles me about static sites (and I do build them) is how everything gets to be regenerated, even though you update only one file.
Now, imagine that your writing patten is small notes, like on twitter, mastodon, or bluesky. Over time, with this pattern, you will end up with thousands of notes. Is each one deserving of a page? Ideally, yes; because they should be linkable. Does it make sense to regenerate thousands of pages every time you add a note? Dunno.
Then, consider all the aggregation pages. For example, a paginated list of all my notes. Or a paginated list of notes distributed by different categories / tags. How many more pages does this create?
And the static assets that all get to be copied from source to output directory at every build.
And of course, comments. Static sites don't have comments.
I don't know. I think someone who invested into building their own site engines, like Jeremy Keith (https://adactio.com/) have it the best.
I can live preview my website from my local server / computer / laptop, while writing content from basically anything. Even a cheap and underpowered writing deck with 400 MHz CPU. The options are limitless.
You're absolutely underestimating the complexity of proper live preview of changes. This is essentially "hot reload" mode, but on the public internet, because it has to run on a public domain. Getting that right is a challenge, and if you don't know why, you haven't attempted to solve it yet.
Switching from word press to static site generator caused disruption to my autoflow habit of posting. WordPress (I didn't have to maintain) had a gui I didn't have to think to use. I still made the switch though.
To me, the thing wordpress installs offer is the GUI. I help a few people with wordpress installs, and I've ended up setting up a private wordpress install, and then I run a script which mirrors the website statically -- this is moderately hacky, and I'm sure could be done better, but as long as I hide the private wordpress install, it means I don't need to worry about keeping it up to date.
I haven't found a static generator which has as nice a WYSIWYG interface as wordpress.
The WordPress hacking/plugin security issue has been a solved problem for well over 10 years now if you're even basically competent. Especially if you're using something like WP Engine or Pantheon for hosting.
For those looking for an SSG with WYSIWYG, please take a look at Publii. I have no affiliation other than being a user, but I wish more people were aware of it.
have you ever heard of caching? because it can do the exact same thing as what you just described, yet WP can also be dynamic, have visual page and post builders, etc...
Many folks on HN are the exact sorts of people who have lived the thankless popular-enough-to-be-an-unpaid-job solo OSS maintainer dream, so I wonder if you feel as annoyed by the tone of this post as I do.
I truly don't understand how the same folks that champion accessibility and humane ideals while humble bragging about working for $5/hour to help get local businesses online can throw so much shade on people who are urgently trying to figure out a way to get paid, often just to keep the projects that they created alive so that these people can continue to use them for free.
I don't know if it's entitlement, projection or just wanting to have it both ways, but I wish they would channel their frustrations into helping to find a sustainable model for OSS creators to make a living wage to keep the magic coming instead of being shitty about people doing their best to find a forever home before their burnout finally kicks in.
Sadly, SSGs can’t make money. Nor should they, because they are simple and sort of the whole point is to be simple and not require complicated resources to build or host.
A frontend-agnostic static site generator doesn't have an "end". You can keep using the final version for years to come. You can maintain a private fork to fix bugs or compatibility issues with newer versions of the language. And if you don't feel like maintaining it, you can migrate content to a different SSG. Or indeed, you can write your own SSG, it's a fun project.
It's sad to see 11ty co-opted like this especially after building a complex project on it with several thousand pages (https://www.extravirginvault.com/). Despite the complexity, I feel like it's only a couple of days work to replatform my site to a more modern SSG like Astro.
Unfortunately I don't think anyone feels strongly enough about 11ty to fight for it when the next SSG is a few Claude Code prompts away.
Who cares? It's open source, you have the literal source code, fork it and move on.
Don't want to expend the effort to do so? Interesting.
Perhaps people need to be more realistic about the code they consume. Treat it as a finished product, take on dependencies you can either afford to maintain or don't need to be maintained at all. Have an exit plan. Relying on someone's unpaid labor to keep your own projects afloat is your problem.
The author seems to think that there's only one type of user of these tools. Namely people who use NeoCities. They're all that matter to him.
Way back in 2015 I was building a large static site using Jekyll and Wordpress CMS as a backend. We had 30+ content editors using it, writing Markdown and I had Jekyll Generator that would execute a SQL query against the Wordpress database to build static content. Every new post would build and deploy the whole site in 2-3 minutes. Over 50k pages of content. This powered a very large marketing website straddling multiple top 10 Google Ad keywords. Business was bringing in several hundred million in ARR.
I knew of at least 3 other similarly large businesses doing this. All the way back in 2015. My current company today builds a static site from a Wordpress backend and I was totally uninvolved in this work (or even suggesting it). The user that this author thinks is a fable is very very real. There is absolutely a market for a CMS backend for an SSG.
Not that I as a developer would have used it, but if my employers could have paid a company for what I built in a nice box instead of paying my salary, they would have.
I've been using Hugo for some of these reasons for the last 6+ years. The project seems to chug along. They've updated the documentation now and everything is super good there.
And I can choose whether or not to use NPM. I've thought of moving from it a few times. But it's just better and solid.
But the other side to this coin is us having problem making money. It's muddy waters for sure. For example, Manjaro Linux was dragged through the mud after they started their company. Not to mention, On the other hand, just like SSG's like Hugo and 11ty, Netlify and Vercel and others are responsible for a ton of free sites (like mine). They need to not just eat, they should be able make a luxurious life if that's what they want.
I am not against anyone trying to make money off of their OSS projects. We need good companies to make money. I just hope it doesn't become anti-consumers. Which is what the OP's concern is. Can't blame him for thinking this as well.
if the kickstarter campaign met its goals, but then their outgoing emails ended up in the spam folders, why does that say cancel? They cite "momentum", but doesn't the fundraising success sustain the momentum of the project and team? solve the email problem and mail the sponsors again, what's the big deal, since when do sponsors need momentum if the goal has been met?
My personal page runs on 11ty since the last 3 years and I enjoyed it a lot.
I’ll probably replace it with pure HTML soon - I found that I don’t need a SSG anymore, I can just use a local LLM to generate HTML out of markdown files and I never use any fancy features anyway.
Why does the JavaScript ecosystem pride itself in not having a framework? That’s the very thing that drove me out of the ecosystem. JavaScript was my first professional language of focus and I was in love with the growth oriented mentality as a younger engineer, but the part that irked me was that I had to constantly be rebuilding the same set of patterns with different tooling, which is the special choose your own adventure hell that is the JS ecosystem.
I left it for elixir and Phoenix and never looked back. There’s just no true ownership and direction that can come close to that of Jose Valim and Chris McCord in the JS ecosystem. It’s so fragmented that it takes the fun out of maintaining a JS codebase.
> Who uses 11ty? NASA, CERN, the TC39 committee, W3C, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Apache, freeCodeCamp, to name a few.
> Imagine if Build Awesome actually reached out to people who regularly make static sites. You know, the userbases on NeoCities or MelonLand or 32-bit Cafe?
One minute you are saying large companies use the product, the next that it was always for hobbyists and shouldn't target corporate features?
> In truth, I myself have started a business that has a near identical concept to Build Awesome. Berry House is my independent web studio
> The difference is though that my model is pay-what-you-can, or pro bono. I developed Calgary Groups for a client and charged $5/hour for my dev work.
That is not a business -- no profit motive. (Working less than minimum wage, even.) Not a good benchmark for comparing what an actual business like Font Awesome should do.
It’s basically a reimplementation of Viaweb, pg’s first startup.
I did it for fun, but I’ll probably use it for my own site. I’m not sure how fast other SSGs run, but this one only takes 15 seconds to build all ~260 essays and such.
Thinking of doing a Show HN. Not sure if it’s interesting enough. No AI except for the finishing touches (importing hundreds of essays and finding a few bugs).
I built static site publishing into AS Notes, to add in to the mix (https://www.asnotes.io an extension for VS Code). It's markdown and wikilink based, and can publish either the whole workspace or from one or more specific folders. I've designed it so that I was not dependent on any platform for my static sites. Publishing is a pro feature, but it's a one time lifetime licence purchase.
The irony is that a key plank of the SDNY's allegations against Roman Storm for his development of Tornado Cash is that he provided a UI (since the backend smart contract is already established as a matter of law to be immutable and outside of Roman Storm's control), and the UI that Roman Storm provided was an (open source) static HTML file that users ran entirely client-side in their own browser.
I'm still completely in love with WebOrigami (https://weborigami.org). It is a 'dialect of JavaScript' that is designed for building static sites. It isn't super popular, but it much more flexible and comprehensive than anything else I've found. Fills the 11ty gap nicely.
Nobody is going to make money from static site generators. How can a kickstarter still raise money for something claude will give them in 2 hours I have no clue. Not all software engineering is dead, but this is dead for sure.
Though I also have no idea how a static website generator can raise tens of millions of dollars.
Migrated my website away from 11ty to my own code today, after reading this. Took me about
45 minutes writing a program generating the exact same result. Honestly, I don't think software should be perpetually maintained. The problem with all these things is people want to much.
I use Eleventy for nearly all of my static sites. Almost every project of mine has at least an 11ty internal docs site. I'm very happy that Eleventy has a home and Zach a job.
But my only thought on this is: Eleventy is an awesome name.
> The truth is, there has been no successful CMS for static-site generators because the only people that give a fuck about creating static sites would much prefer to use a (free and local) IDE and a terminal.
I think a lot of less technical users would love a desktop app (or a web app integrated with their hosting provider) that lets them manage their website via a GUI, preview their changes with a split-screen view, and upload to a web host. Something similar to Microsoft Frontpage or the like.
I suspect the reason that Neocities got so popular was in part because of its web editor, and having a more powerful version of that would be fantastic. If this integrated with Git to allow version tracking and multiple authors to collaborate, even better.
11ty is my favourite site builder. Hugo is better in terms of dev support / build speed / opinionated simplicity - and I've also used Hugo several times - but quite often I've run into a wall where Hugo isn't flexible enough to let me do things the way I want. 11ty lets you do (almost) whatever the hell you please.
I'm sad to hear that the "OG 11ty era" has ended. But, as others have noted, fortunately 11ty will live on, so long as folks keep using it and hacking away at it.
What a horrible mess. One "project" created after another one and eventually ditched in favour of creating something else from scratch. No one wants it, they are pissed and they blame Gmail for this. What a shit-show.
I don't want to learn your project, thank you very much. If anything, I'll create my own. Nowadays, it's super easy to do it with AI, but even before AI, I would have still prefered creating my own stuff instead od using yours. I don't want you as a dependency, I don't want you to become the master of my work, I don't want to try to understand how your pitiful "project" works since it would be 10 times easier for me to write the functionality I need from scratch myself. I don't want to do a security audit for your stuff and try to understand how it works while creating my own will always negate this problem entirely. I don't want to work for your "resume" so you could proudly put your turd "project" there seeking better employment. Not at my expense, not at the expense of my time and nerves.
It's annoying when a project you depend on gets taken in a direction you didn't sign up for. But the silver lining here is that the cost of maintaining a fork has dropped dramatically. A few years ago, forking something like 11ty and keeping it alive long-term was a real commitment — bug triage, dependency updates, staying compatible with the ecosystem. Now, that kind of maintenance work is exactly what LLMs are good at. You can realistically fork it, keep it on the version you liked, and have an AI handle the boring upkeep.
The perpetual "this project is now dead" anxiety around OSS is becoming less warranted. Which might upset people who'd rather debate sustainability models than just fix the dep.
> The truth is, there has been no successful CMS for static-site generators because the only people that give a fuck about creating static sites would much prefer to use a (free and local) IDE and a terminal.
I'm not sure how successful they are, but pinegrow[1] is a thing. It's not worth it to me to pay $99 per year for a personal website (the only static site I want), but there are many people who have static websites that are an essential part of a profitable business and these people don't necessarily want to use the terminal.
> The truth is, there has been no successful CMS for static-site generators because the only people that give a fuck about creating static sites would much prefer to use a (free and local) IDE and a terminal.
I completely disagree with this. The main problem is that these people don't want to pay for such a solution.
There's a thriving ecosystem of headless CMS for commercial websites: multi-user, support editing landing pages, etc.
Things like Decap were too basic (running it for any complex blog is a pain) and didn't solve much for developers building a Github Pages blog (while also being useless to startups).
I run three static blog websites, two personal and one for our agency. I want a CMS on all of them. I want to be able to edit from the iPad, easily upload images, etc. But my hosting itself is basically free, so hard to justify paying for a CMS.
I'm using Sveltia for all three now, it's still in early access but in my experience is much better than NetlifyCMS/Decap or PagesCMS.
189 comments
Eleventy might not receive new features, your website will still work.
> Eleventy might not receive new features, your website will still work.
The beauty of SSGs, in one sentence, folks.
I'm not aware of any CVEs in HTML, either.
> The beauty of SSGs, in one sentence, folks
Incidentally, also the curse, for the authors who attempt to monetize SSGs: most users prioritize control, and don't clamor for new features. A nightmare combination for *aaS peddlers.
> Incidentally, also the curse.
Too true. The coin has two sides.
> For all I know Jekyll has been abandoned.
Side Note Spoiler: it's still kickin'. I try to keep my things on Debian-stable, and am the primary maintainer of about five websites managed by Jekyll. There was a Ruby 3 and it required like 20 minutes to get things working again. I wish all software required this little attention!
I stuck around on Hugo for quite some time and I've never had any such issues yet, but now I've also wrapped the build in Nix. So yeah I'll do the same - if it ever stops working I'll just pin the build inputs at the last version that worked.
I _think_ the Hugo folks seem to understand the "just build my fucking HTML templates" principle. I.e. for most use cases the job of a static site generator is simple enough that breaking compatibility is literally never justified. So hopefully pinning won't be necessary.
Great tool, though.
In addition to Hugo, it happens constantly in GoReleaser. In both cases, they're excellent tools, but the unending renaming spree is just awful. Weirdly, both are in the Go ecosystem, which generally values backwards compatibility.
Maybe it's just that my site is extremely dumb? I forked an "ultra minimal" theme and deleted most of its code. So perhaps I just use such a tiny subset of the template system that I haven't been affected.
I use it to generate my resume, and I went almost 10 years without updating Jekyll. Since Claude has come on the scene, I used it to upgrade everything to the latest and it was quite painless. There's something beautiful about a system that is so stable. Sinatra especially is a joy, because it has been so stable for so many years.
When I really needed a landing page that looked like it fell off a UFO I did it in Vite-React (such a joy to use semantic components, like write
and it is a simple python script that uploads the dist files to S3 (no "WTF went wrong with the github action") invalidates Cloudfront [1], extracts metadata, maintains the metadata database. There's a clear path to extending the system to do exactly what I want to do in the future unlike some SSG which I will have to relearn from scratch in six months when I want to make a big change... and had it up and running and in front of end users in a weekend.That is, SSG has no commercial potential because any individual or organization which is capable of maintaining and customizing an SSG can create one from scratch that does exactly what they need with less cost and effort and success is only possible through hypnotizing people into thinking otherwise -- in many fields of software this happens every day but I think not SSG, like those people are going to stay asleep and dream of Drupal and Wordpress.
[1] ... and if I want to move to some similar platform I just implement it instead of struggle with "plugins" and "modules" and other overcomplicated extension mechanisms
As a learning exercise, I wrote my own little SSG in ocaml, and man I forgot how nice a language it is. Tooling is still a bit rough but lots better than it used to be
My little blog (in my profile) is built using it: https://github.com/girvo/jgirvin_blog_ocaml
Horrible Ocaml I’m sure, but between YOCaml and Soupault, the best SSGs are all written in this language. Fascinating really
This was the beauty of 11ty. It just puts together HTML files from templates, and maybe handles sitemap and RSS if you need. That will probably change now.
[1]: Just be sure to set
htmlTemplateEngineto false in the config, if you don’t want to use templating features in your posts: https://www.11ty.dev/docs/languages/html/ https://www.11ty.dev/docs/template-overrides/It's somewhat counterintuitive, but the added complexity leads to simpler projects that are easier to maintain long term. I have simple markdown files, and a separate, code-based conversion process that works well for me.
Also the documentation for eleventy was always confusing to me. I almost got the impression that "it's so simple, we don't have to explain it". Whereas astro's documentation is much more accesible; there were a handful of cases where there was something I wanted to do and astro had an example of exactly that. I didn't have to do guesswork, just follow the examples in the way the creators intended. Stuff like that is important.
> Having the islands of actual react stuff is incredibly useful as well.
I've tried multiple times to come up with usecases where they are worth it, but still haven't found any. The only theoretical examples are things where you wouldn't be using Astro in thr first place, like real-time document collaboration or something.
Curious what you've found them so useful for. Besides just preferring React syntax to HTML+TS I guess? But again that seems to go against the point of using Astro.
But 11ty really was so much simpler if all you need is to put together some templates, and don’t want to deal with component stuff. That said, the docs really are lacking in some parts.
For those who post regular updates on those sites, there are great and cheap WP plugins that export the whole site as static to something like FTP or S3, so you can just firewall the actual WP behind an IP restriction and host the actual public-facing site from S3/whatever.
- WYSIWYG editor is table stakes. The lovely folks at marketing once thought I was hacking when I
ps -eaf-ed in an unresponsive Macbook.- They "put" images in their post. They don't "upload the image and position it with CSS".
- It's the marketing department so they have to have all sorts of bells and whistles. At the very least tracking, at most some obscure integration plug-in that as an engineer I have no kind words for. Social integrations and "You may also like..." sections also come to mind.
> cheap WP plugins that export the whole site as static to something like FTP or S3, so you can just firewall the actual WP behind an IP restriction and host the actual public-facing site from S3/whatever.
Not that I have extensive WP experience but unless you can name me an actual plugin that has good street cred for being used in the wild wild west, I'm gonna say this is not as easy as you make it sound. For one you just described a very rudimentary data pipeline which someone has to support and maintain even infrequently. Also, speaking from experience, plugins don't always play nice with other plugins. I once tried to export my very basic personal site out of WP to find the footnotes all messed up (I don't know now but back then I handled footnotes with a plugin).
Every few years I go looking for something that's not Wordpress that you could hand to a marketing department, but there is no viable alternative (that's not Drupal).
> It's the marketing department so they have to have all sorts of bells and whistles. At the very least tracking, at most some obscure integration plug-in that as an engineer I have no kind words for.
The world would be a better place if you forced the lovely marketing folks to use a SSG and you know it!
I taught several absolutely non-technical people to edit the content of Jekyll websites we maintain together. I made them GitHub accounts, taught them the basics of Markdown, and said that if they break anything I can fix it easily, so they shouldn't worry about it. Sometimes they break things and eventually I fix it. It works great. I can only imagine the horrors I'd have to deal with if there was WYSIWYG!
It's wild to me that this post's timeline makes no mention whatsoever of Movable Type, and at one point it links to another author's post titled "A Complete History of Static: The Beginning to WordPress Headless" which also makes no mention whatsoever of Movable Type. Now I feel old :/
It's also interesting that so many people in this thread are saying "What I really need is a SSG that also works as a CMS with a GUI" -- that's literally what Movable Type excelled at. Especially versions 4 and 5, which had a FOSS edition. A number of major US media sites were powered by it for years. However because it was written in Perl, that became a huge negative point as Perl fell out of use in the industry.
So bye bye Hugo.
I could understand someone might refuse learning LaTex but markdown is so simple.
RTF editing sucks badly if you have to include it in your project. No one wants to specifically pay for implementing it but they also expect it to be there.
But each editor also has its issues with generating "backend html" doing bunch of wonky stuff so it works for this editor — using that text in various other places and when you have multiple rich text fields and not single big one to edit whole document is always a major PITA.
Then you get whatever they write to PDF report so for example you have to render HTML correctly there. Amount of ways it can break is basically infinite, getting paragraphs page breaks is non trivial amount of work, especially when customer wants their own layout for the report and not generic looking or just broken layout. So problem is mix and match display of whatever they write in different places.
Not to mention, everyone wants prefilled templates, so they don't start from scratch, oh and your templates need to have dynamically filled in placeholders, now you have to put something like tags that will be updated by your back end.
Maybe you need to send it via API and all kind of companies have WAF on incoming/outgoing data then you have to strip tags.
Yes you can encode/decode, limit options, white list allowed tags, and I was doing that for years now, but amount of things that break is still big and another customer wants you to enable lists when you wanted to support just italic, bold, then you have whole blast radius and feature creep is real.
ROI is just not there, as I mentioned no one wants to specifically pay for all that, we have a really good run telling customers to just use plain text, amount of regressions to be tested, amount of expectations of things to work out of the box once you go with rich text is really high.
Bar to jump to is basically re-implement MS Word — oh did I mention everyone will expect copy pasting from Word to work perfectly - just imagine how much time your customer support has to spend explaining you limited options in that field to be just bold and italic.
> RTF editor
Is that what they call WYSIWYG? :eyes:
Pandoc is your best friend in such cases: https://pandoc.org/
I crawled own website and downloaded each, and converted to markdown then used static site generator (custom in javascript)
runs on cloudflare pages for free with no downtimes or "fee".
if you want to see result: https://aretecodex.pages.dev/guides/recomposition
Couple of problems:
To edit content i've to use "image paste" plugin and configure its base directory, image path in project setting in .vscode
I lost the comment/upvote feature.
I lost "search"
> I’m genuinely shocked at the number of sites on the Net that use Wordpress, dynamically assembling markup with PHP for every page view,
What puzzles me about static sites (and I do build them) is how everything gets to be regenerated, even though you update only one file.
Now, imagine that your writing patten is small notes, like on twitter, mastodon, or bluesky. Over time, with this pattern, you will end up with thousands of notes. Is each one deserving of a page? Ideally, yes; because they should be linkable. Does it make sense to regenerate thousands of pages every time you add a note? Dunno.
Then, consider all the aggregation pages. For example, a paginated list of all my notes. Or a paginated list of notes distributed by different categories / tags. How many more pages does this create?
And the static assets that all get to be copied from source to output directory at every build.
And of course, comments. Static sites don't have comments.
I don't know. I think someone who invested into building their own site engines, like Jeremy Keith (https://adactio.com/) have it the best.
* the ability to schedule posts
* a ton of plugins
* a lot of people who know how to use it
* a reasonable WYSIWYG interface
As far as I know, most SSGs fall down on one or more of those dimensions.
I haven't found a static generator which has as nice a WYSIWYG interface as wordpress.
I truly don't understand how the same folks that champion accessibility and humane ideals while humble bragging about working for $5/hour to help get local businesses online can throw so much shade on people who are urgently trying to figure out a way to get paid, often just to keep the projects that they created alive so that these people can continue to use them for free.
I don't know if it's entitlement, projection or just wanting to have it both ways, but I wish they would channel their frustrations into helping to find a sustainable model for OSS creators to make a living wage to keep the magic coming instead of being shitty about people doing their best to find a forever home before their burnout finally kicks in.
> “We believe that open source should be sustainable and open source maintainers should get paid!”
> Maintainer: introduces commercial features “Not like that”
> Maintainer: works for a large tech co “Not like that”
> Maintainer: takes investment “Not like that”
I wish them the best.
Unfortunately I don't think anyone feels strongly enough about 11ty to fight for it when the next SSG is a few Claude Code prompts away.
Follow up (by OP) Cancelled (5 points, 1 month ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47282675
Related Introducing: Build Awesome (3 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47245750
https://www.11ty.dev/blog/build-awesome/
Safe to say there's a number around HN who have used/are using 11ty and might have some interest.
Am grateful for Zach's dedication over the years and believer in what 11ty stands for (and more recently what webc brings to the table/ecosystem)
Don't want to expend the effort to do so? Interesting.
Perhaps people need to be more realistic about the code they consume. Treat it as a finished product, take on dependencies you can either afford to maintain or don't need to be maintained at all. Have an exit plan. Relying on someone's unpaid labor to keep your own projects afloat is your problem.
Way back in 2015 I was building a large static site using Jekyll and Wordpress CMS as a backend. We had 30+ content editors using it, writing Markdown and I had Jekyll Generator that would execute a SQL query against the Wordpress database to build static content. Every new post would build and deploy the whole site in 2-3 minutes. Over 50k pages of content. This powered a very large marketing website straddling multiple top 10 Google Ad keywords. Business was bringing in several hundred million in ARR.
I knew of at least 3 other similarly large businesses doing this. All the way back in 2015. My current company today builds a static site from a Wordpress backend and I was totally uninvolved in this work (or even suggesting it). The user that this author thinks is a fable is very very real. There is absolutely a market for a CMS backend for an SSG.
Not that I as a developer would have used it, but if my employers could have paid a company for what I built in a nice box instead of paying my salary, they would have.
And I can choose whether or not to use NPM. I've thought of moving from it a few times. But it's just better and solid.
But the other side to this coin is us having problem making money. It's muddy waters for sure. For example, Manjaro Linux was dragged through the mud after they started their company. Not to mention, On the other hand, just like SSG's like Hugo and 11ty, Netlify and Vercel and others are responsible for a ton of free sites (like mine). They need to not just eat, they should be able make a luxurious life if that's what they want.
I am not against anyone trying to make money off of their OSS projects. We need good companies to make money. I just hope it doesn't become anti-consumers. Which is what the OP's concern is. Can't blame him for thinking this as well.
I’ll probably replace it with pure HTML soon - I found that I don’t need a SSG anymore, I can just use a local LLM to generate HTML out of markdown files and I never use any fancy features anyway.
I left it for elixir and Phoenix and never looked back. There’s just no true ownership and direction that can come close to that of Jose Valim and Chris McCord in the JS ecosystem. It’s so fragmented that it takes the fun out of maintaining a JS codebase.
[0]: https://shoelace.style/
> Who uses 11ty? NASA, CERN, the TC39 committee, W3C, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Apache, freeCodeCamp, to name a few.
> Imagine if Build Awesome actually reached out to people who regularly make static sites. You know, the userbases on NeoCities or MelonLand or 32-bit Cafe?
One minute you are saying large companies use the product, the next that it was always for hobbyists and shouldn't target corporate features?
> In truth, I myself have started a business that has a near identical concept to Build Awesome. Berry House is my independent web studio
> The difference is though that my model is pay-what-you-can, or pro bono. I developed Calgary Groups for a client and charged $5/hour for my dev work.
That is not a business -- no profit motive. (Working less than minimum wage, even.) Not a good benchmark for comparing what an actual business like Font Awesome should do.
https://github.com/shawwn/pg
It’s basically a reimplementation of Viaweb, pg’s first startup.
I did it for fun, but I’ll probably use it for my own site. I’m not sure how fast other SSGs run, but this one only takes 15 seconds to build all ~260 essays and such.
Thinking of doing a Show HN. Not sure if it’s interesting enough. No AI except for the finishing touches (importing hundreds of essays and finding a few bugs).
Though I also have no idea how a static website generator can raise tens of millions of dollars.
But my only thought on this is: Eleventy is an awesome name.
> The truth is, there has been no successful CMS for static-site generators because the only people that give a fuck about creating static sites would much prefer to use a (free and local) IDE and a terminal.
I think a lot of less technical users would love a desktop app (or a web app integrated with their hosting provider) that lets them manage their website via a GUI, preview their changes with a split-screen view, and upload to a web host. Something similar to Microsoft Frontpage or the like.
I suspect the reason that Neocities got so popular was in part because of its web editor, and having a more powerful version of that would be fantastic. If this integrated with Git to allow version tracking and multiple authors to collaborate, even better.
I'm sad to hear that the "OG 11ty era" has ended. But, as others have noted, fortunately 11ty will live on, so long as folks keep using it and hacking away at it.
I don't want to learn your project, thank you very much. If anything, I'll create my own. Nowadays, it's super easy to do it with AI, but even before AI, I would have still prefered creating my own stuff instead od using yours. I don't want you as a dependency, I don't want you to become the master of my work, I don't want to try to understand how your pitiful "project" works since it would be 10 times easier for me to write the functionality I need from scratch myself. I don't want to do a security audit for your stuff and try to understand how it works while creating my own will always negate this problem entirely. I don't want to work for your "resume" so you could proudly put your turd "project" there seeking better employment. Not at my expense, not at the expense of my time and nerves.
The perpetual "this project is now dead" anxiety around OSS is becoming less warranted. Which might upset people who'd rather debate sustainability models than just fix the dep.
> The truth is, there has been no successful CMS for static-site generators because the only people that give a fuck about creating static sites would much prefer to use a (free and local) IDE and a terminal.
I'm not sure how successful they are, but pinegrow[1] is a thing. It's not worth it to me to pay $99 per year for a personal website (the only static site I want), but there are many people who have static websites that are an essential part of a profitable business and these people don't necessarily want to use the terminal.
[1]: https://pinegrow.com/
> The truth is, there has been no successful CMS for static-site generators because the only people that give a fuck about creating static sites would much prefer to use a (free and local) IDE and a terminal.
I completely disagree with this. The main problem is that these people don't want to pay for such a solution.
There's a thriving ecosystem of headless CMS for commercial websites: multi-user, support editing landing pages, etc.
Things like Decap were too basic (running it for any complex blog is a pain) and didn't solve much for developers building a Github Pages blog (while also being useless to startups).
I run three static blog websites, two personal and one for our agency. I want a CMS on all of them. I want to be able to edit from the iPad, easily upload images, etc. But my hosting itself is basically free, so hard to justify paying for a CMS.
I'm using Sveltia for all three now, it's still in early access but in my experience is much better than NetlifyCMS/Decap or PagesCMS.