I've been using the same version of Jekyll, using the same outdated, discontinued version of ruby, for more than 10y.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.
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.
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
<a href="there">description</a>
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
<Event date="2026-04-18">Earth Day Parade Ithaca Commons</Event>
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.
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.
Why would I want my WIP site to be on the public internet? This has been built into Jekyll for years. Probably other SSGs too but I don't know/use them.
Because you're thinking in the context of a solo developer working on their site locally. You don't need a CMS. People that want to collaboratively work on a website, some of which may lack technical skills, need a way of previewing their edits that doesn't involve running shell commands.
You're conflating the two unnecessarily. There's no reason Jekyll's server has to run on the editor's local machine. See my other comment about jekyll-admin which can be used collaboratively: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47737324
I don't see much of a difference between `jekyll serve` and the e.g. `service nginx start && service php-fpm start && service mariadb start` that would be needed to run WordPress. In fact I don't run my WIP Jekyll site on the same machine that I edit from. Mine is available only on my personal mesh VPN, but it could easily be available publicly if I wanted it to be.
I would appreciate getting into more details. As it sounds like a made-up problem to me. Perhaps you don’t understand how simple it is to have a static website as compared to a dynamic one. Especially to some simple project.
You can always reduce complexity by moving the goal posts. In context of the original proposition—that one of the core values WordPress provides is live preview—we have to assume a reasonably complex website authored by multiple people.
Live Preview means, then, that you need to:
- have a web-based editor behind secure auth,
- create an environment resembling CI to rebuild the site on demand,
- trigger rebuilds when a user modifies the content stored on the server,
- make the new build available in a draft environment
- …where it doesn't affect the live site,
- …only grant access to collaborators,
- …without breaking assets, links in the pages, CORS, or CSP.
There are more constraints and pitfalls that I'm not going to enumerate here. My point is, this stops being simple as soon as you stop being hand wavy about it.
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.
Its project page doesn't seem to have a screenshot of the post/page editor, but its editor is simplemde so one can just look at it directly: https://simplemde.com/
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.
The ultimate entitlement is refusing to pay for tooling, while expecting to be getting a paid job as well.
I am hard line on not feeling sorry for projects going away, being taken over by organisations, when it mattered people should have actually sponsored them, instead of bosting how great is to get it all for free/gratis.
Every, single time, someone posts a cool paid project, there is the usual comment why pay, look at MIT/BSD/Apache/... project so and so.
That is true, but nowadays most paid projects end up being perpetual subscriptions. Which I kind of get, as on-going maintenance still costs, but it used to be that you paid for a tool once and only paid again if you wanted/needed an updated version. I'd gladly pay $15-$60 for a tool once (and again if I needed an update) but $10-$15 per month for 20 different things (that I will only use occasionally) is just out of reach for me financially and I live in a "rich" first-world country.
Working for a SaaS company is the greatest thing if you are a software developer who doesn't care about business: even if you don't care about business the business cares about you!
There was an article in Byte magazine circa 1983 describing this dilemma: you release a successful 1.0 of a product, get a pulse of money, hold back some of it to develop 2.0, N months later version 2.0 competes with not only your competitors but with 1.0 in the minds of your most satisfied customers. Now if you're planning for N months and it is really N+M they have to scramble for money to pay your paycheck or release the product before it is ready or both. If you're laid off you could be one of the lucky ones because working under those conditions can be a living hell.
I'm glad I'm working on a service because even if a project I am working on is critical to acquiring and retaining customers it's not an automatic crisis that a project is a little late.
In the last 10 years or so SaaS seems like an investor-driven fad driven by the ease of putting a valuation on a consistent cashflow, but I think it is more basic than that.
That's not to say that the 'anti-consumer' concerns aren't real. Also with generative AI we are seeing that some things need to account for the resources they use. In the 2010s I was looking at a family of proto-AI businesses where my business partner and I were struggling with pricing, like we could not set an $X/month price such that (i) some users might not cost 10$X or 100$X a month to serve and (ii) that $X doesn't exceed the value the subscriber would get from the service for many users thus you don't make the sale. Yet we also liked the idea of stable revenue and boy all the software biz people and investors we talked to couldn't see past the "S, M, L, XL" subscription model.
Yeah. Because they're 14 and don't have a credit card, or they don't have any money, or the price is completely unaffordable (looking at you, IDA) or they hate your software and wish your company would DIAF but are forced to use it for various reasons anyway.
You might as well be nice to the people who will give you money, so that they'll give you money. Being hostile to people who are trying to give you money is rarely a winning business strategy.
All good reasons, except when it comes from people that can afford Apple, feel entitled to get gratis stuff, never pay anything else, and then come to complain on HN that another project died.
Programs were distributed on stacks of diskettes, towards the end of that era on CD-ROMs. There was no licence server to phone home to on the internet.
You bought Borland C++ compiler, installed it and used it - you were free to buy the next version when it came out or not.
You’re right about that. But now put the users in the equation. If you’re making and marketing a B2B tool, it’s fine. But for a B2C tool, that tool will have to be so good that people will be willing to keep paying an ongoing subscription. That means that you’re now also competing against other cheaper alternatives (OSS) and people’s other life expenses (including other subscriptions).
It depends on the niche you’re targeting but I’d go as far as to say it might sometimes be better to sell 100 copies at once every now and then, than get 5-10 people who are willing to subscribe and might all cancel their subscriptions a few months later when some other subscription-based tool shows up. For most people it’s easier to justify a one-time $10 purchase than locking in a $10 monthly subscription.
But I agree that there’s no universal solution and it depends on what tool you’re making and in what niche.
I'm not so sure. If they can't pay for a one-time purchase, they won't be able to afford a subscription. Subscriptions are always more expensive in the end, that's why they exist in the first place. I don't see how people not using the software while still not becoming customers is a fix to anything.
Subscriptions can be cheaper in some ways and more expensive than others.
Adobe Creative Suite used to require a one time eye-watering payment and very few people could afford to keep it up to date, you might skip several upgrades before buying the next one if you did at all.
CC's monthly payment makes it easy to enter. You are paying more in the long term than if you bought one version of it, but less than you'd pay if you kept your subscription up -- so somebody could make the case that it is more expensive than it used to be or less expensive than it used to be.
"Rent-seeking is the only way to fix piracy" is an interesting take.
It seems to be going very well for video and music streaming services. Piracy is certainly nearly dead at this point and not at all at record-high levels.
I agree with you in spirit. I also think back to that moment a few years ago where everyone suddenly realized that OpenSSL was being developed almost entirely by one dude with very, very little funding. Fundamental building blocks of modern society that might fail because some poor guy worked himself to death in obscurity because he didn't know how to better ask for help. We should all be haunted by this and consciously urge our employers to be part of the solution and not the problem.
That tangent aside, part of the big problem with paying for tooling is that the tooling itself is typically built on tooling and libraries that are also built on libraries and tooling.... all the way down. To generalize, many of those libraries farthest back in the chain are the least likely to get the sort of funding someone who, eg. writes a wrapper around ffmpeg or whatever might get.
I don't claim to have the solution, but I feel like this topic is the tech equivalent of not worrying about global warming.
Neither side can have it both ways, but there's way too much whining about people not paying.
Want people to pay for your tools? Don't offer them for free.
This is related to my usual point here, that if one offers something for free under a GPL or MIT license, claiming to do so for the betterment of humanity, only to later retract it because corporations profit without paying or AI companies use it for model training, that person is an entitled liar who released proprietary software while using openness and generosity as a marketing strategy.
Proprietary software is fine. Lying about it and using good ideals as marketing strategy is not. That applies as much to "released as MIT so it be useful to many, then unreleased because author realized it might end up in training data of some LLMs (and in so doing, actually become useful to many people)" software, as it does to blogs and all the whining about AI denying them credit (and pre-AI, search engines, except then the developer community was on side of search and not free-but-with-ads/credit publishers).
> Every, single time, someone posts a cool paid project, there is the usual comment why pay, look at MIT/BSD/Apache/... project so and so.
That comes from some combination of the project looking not worth a cent, probably not working (at least not for the use case intended), payments being a big step starting a real multi-party relationship, much distinct from just looking at a webpage or playing with code locally, and the poster being a student or younger.
I too strongly favored MIT over everything when I was a kid. Didn't have money to pay for anything, and GPL was complicated and my slightly older colleagues (with probably more business sense than I) didn't like it.
So much of people's thinking today makes no sense to me.
Since 2010 there has been an increasing tendency for the likes of Google and Facebook to drain an increasing fraction out of the value out of the web. Around 2012 I had a site that was expensive to host and bleeding money and looking for ways to salvage it and realized that there were many crawlers that were hitting my site hard, harder than Google, and almost all of them, like Chinese webcrawlers, were sending me 0 traffic and making 0 value for me. So I cut them off. Bing was practically in that category, sending barely detectable traffic, but I wanted to support some competition for Google.
As I saw it a few years ago a bunch of people were apoplectic about OpenAI all of a sudden and I'm like, boy they are asleep at the switch, boy are they running in a herd, boy are they slamming on the breaks the next day after they crash their car. I mean like 10 years before that my wife was furious at me because I ran up a balance on our HELOC because of Google trouble.
> if one offers something for free under a GPL or MIT license, claiming to do so for the betterment of humanity, only to later retract it because corporations profit without paying or AI companies use it for model training
Both the GPL and MIT licenses require attribution, so by publishing open-source software, developers are not consenting to LLM training.
> if one offers something for free under a GPL or MIT license, claiming to do so for the betterment of humanity, only to later retract it
I would wager that an overwhelming majority of people who choose FOSS licenses do so without ever making any grandiose claims about the betterment of humanity. Yet upon any suggestion of a license change, if the project is popular, they get attacked for being a lying scheming rug-puller all the same.
> that person is an entitled liar who released proprietary software while using openness and generosity as a marketing strategy
Why do you automatically assume they're a liar, and not just someone whose circumstances or opinions changed over time? Or just responding to changes in the competitive landscape or business cycle?
If you release FOSS software, it seems your only socially acceptable options are to keep future versions FOSS forever, or abandon the project entirely if/when your circumstances no longer permit FOSS development. How is that state of affairs beneficial to anyone?
> Proprietary software is fine.
I agree, but our industry also has a vocal minority of open source purists, who treat anything using non-OSI-approved licenses as toxic waste -- even software using a quite generous source-available license.
For B2C software, that situation is manageable: the purists simply won't touch the software, and will loudly pan it on forums like HN, but plenty of others will try it if it's useful.
But for B2B software, it's more problematic, since there are enough open source purists out there that most tech companies employ at least a few, influencing corporate policy about acceptable licenses. If a new B2B software product has no OSI-approved FOSS edition at all, the purists tend to majorly tank adoption, which hugely impacts the business viability of the product.
So if you're bootstrapping a new B2B infrastructure product that doesn't lend itself to SaaS, what license do you pick? If you go FOSS, you severely limit the economic viability of your own work. Or if you go non-FOSS, you severely limit adoption, which then has the same outcome.
> That comes from some combination of the project looking not worth a cent, probably not working (at least not for the use case intended), payments being a big step
If it was just about money/payments, then non-OSI "source available" licenses would be far more popular, especially ones that allow the software to be used free/gratis for all situations that don't directly compete with the software creator. Yet instead the widespread attitude towards these licenses seems to be far more mixed. How do you explain that phenomenon?
I want Zach to be paid, 11ty is my favourite SSG. I think the way Font Awesome is going about this is unwise. I contribute to the Open Collective of 11ty (as I state in my post). I don't know how that can be misread.
Idk if it's fair to characterise someone helping build a "community-driven directory to help people discover and connect with grassroots organizations, clubs, activist groups, and community initiatives" as "working for $5/hour to help get local businesses online". It's akin to complaining that pro-bono work devalues the profession of law.
It feels like there is entitlement on both sides. People who do OSS work feel entitled to financial benefits, despite explicitly choosing to give their work away for free. And people who consume open source software feel entitled to unpaid labor in perpetuity. It kind of sucks on both ends.
Rich Hickey wrote an essay titled "Open Source is Not About You" [0], where he states "As a user of something open source you are not thereby entitled to anything at all. You are not entitled to contribute. You are not entitled to features. You are not entitled to the attention of others. You are not entitled to having value attached to your complaints. You are not entitled to this explanation."
This is true. Unequivocally. What is also true is that OSS is also not about the contributors. They aren't owed anything by the consumers. They aren't entitled to any compensation, and they aren't entitled to others putting effort into making their contributions sustainable, helping them make a living wage, or alleviating burnout. We're all adults here, we can stop working on something if it's causing us pain or suffering. And we can freely fork a project if it's going in a direction we don't agree. That is the nature of open source. It's just a licensing model, which only exists because of certain laws. Otherwise, it's just a decision on what is public and private. Nothing more.
So if a project isn't going in the direction you want? Shut up and fork it. Not getting paid for your work? Find a way to monetise it or move on. Don't whine about either of these things on the internet.
You make some excellent points, but what I think your perspective lacks is empathy. This stuff is so complicated.
If someone starts working on a project in college and 3-4 years later it blows up, they might now have a young family to consider. The person working on this thing that people love is no longer the same person who started it. In other words: life happened. Perspectives change.
It's also kind of pointless to deny human nature and we should at least try to assume best intentions; it's one thing to say all of the Rich Hickey stuff, and you might even believe it at the beginning of a project. X years later when someone raises $20M to build a company around the best parts of what you did and often forgets to mention you in the origin story... I suspect that would mess with you, and all of that stuff about entitlement would start to feel a bit thin. I don't begrudge people for those emotions, because it's not my place to do so and I see myself in their imperfect-ness.
Ultimately, I am optimistic that we will continue to establish better and better ways to create sustainable projects with maintainers that are compensated for their efforts.
Well, if you confronted me with an individual case of course I would feel empathy. That wouldn't change that I think they have incorrect ideas about open source, but I also wouldn't judge them either.
My point is more that people should try to have more realistic views about open source. People aren't obligated to credit your MIT licensed code (beyond the licence file) and you should be clear on that when you chose that licence. Heck, I've seen OSS maintainers outraged because someone forked their code, despite prominently crediting the source [0]. Some people consider that "bad form", in the same way people might consider monetising something previously open source to be "bad form". I think in both cases, people should just choose more appropriate licences. Can't have your cake and eat it too.
I think Hecrj put it well here:
> 'Me giving away more "free gifts" cannot ever be considered "competing" with someone else that is also giving away "free gifts". The only way for someone to conclude that is if the original gifts are not truly "free", but come with some "hidden" expectations attached to them.'
If you believe that there are expectations attached to your code, you should choose a licence congruent to those expectations. Trying to enforce that through culture is probably a bad idea and will lead to strife.
> Ultimately, I am optimistic that we will continue to establish better and better ways to create sustainable projects with maintainers that are compensated for their efforts.
That link is a strong argument to support your position, no question. On this class of example, we have no disagreement. Those folks appear to have missed the seminar where they explain how this whole OSS thing works.
That said, I've said irrationally defensive things to people abusing my code when I'm tired and depressed, too. These are called passion projects for good reasons.
Where I would lodge disagreement is that I reject the notion that OSS is this pure, primeval mana which is made less righteous when people remember that they need money for rent. I don't think we should encourage people to see countless hours of volunteer effort as undeserving of financial support. I believe that OSS gets better when people are well compensated for contributing to it.
I respect the folks who are able to do it, but I resist the side-eye these folks often deliver when they hear someone is looking for a way to keep the lights on.
I agree with Rich Hickey in that. I use Debian a lot, but i am fully aware i am not entitled to any sort of free support when things don’t go i want them to go. I get what i pay for. If i want things to go my way i will have to make the effort myself. By investing time and/or money.
Why do you think it’s the same folks? People tend to be louder when they don’t agree with something, and many topics will divide a community mostly in half. The end result is that you will more than likely hear complaints and subtle digs/insults no matter what happens.
> 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
I know you don't want to hear the obvious, but making your passion your paycheck is a one-way ticket to burnout. Even your heroes are still human.
The passion is the magic, and keeping it going requires contrast with something else as a day job. You really don't want to know the pain of losing both because they're one and the same. Burnout is not inevitable nor inherent to age or experience. It's actually the opposite if you set proper boundaries and get a grip.
That said, what's the deal with this topic coming up over and over? Is it just coming from young people too afraid of the broader working world, or is it something more sinister? Is this opinion being propagated by bad actors trying to take advantage of young people wanting to work this way (the "rockstar" delusion)?
You make some excellent points. Especially wrt how the fastest way to hate what you love is to rely upon it to pay the bills.
That said, I do feel as though you're presenting a nuanced topic as a false dichotomy. There's lots of people who have figured out how to build something sustainable that blurs the line between occupation and enjoyment. We only tend to pathologize when talking about folks who haven't figured out how to make what they created into a flywheel.
The real trick is to figure out a viable structure to fund a lot more projects. Kickstarter, Patreon, Etsy, even GitHub Sponsors are steps in a positive direction. Things really are better for builders than they were 20 years ago. That should be celebrated.
Yet, I think it's very likely that there's something just as disruptive (in a positive way) for OSS and makers in general as, for example, OnlyFans was for adult content that we just haven't stumbled on yet. So when I implore the person who wrote the OP to focus on solutions, this is broadly what I was hoping for.
Making something sustainable is a different problem and a different set of skills.
I have nothing against anyone who wants to do both. I'm just saying some variant of what I'm thinking has to be why it's not as popular as you want or expect.
Something else worth considering is that people can actually be much better at (and better off) doing things they're not so passionate about.
This isn't just about devs being precious about their feelings or capacity to work. It's about control. Corrupting the direction of the project was my original point and where most of my disagreement comes from.
I would not expect most workers in any field to be so naive. The amount of convincing and money it usually takes to get someone to give up control is necessarily greater than what it was originally worth to that person. More often than not, creative people are also sophisticated enough to see that they may not fully appreciate the meaning of their project longer term right now, and the default answer has to be "no" possibly forever.
Someone asking a creative person to give even an inch of control is the one in need, not the other way around. They have to be on the creative person's level to get anywhere. Even just simple collaboration or discussion can be difficult if they don't feel it's fair. This is a very tall order and at that point they might as well stop begging and manipulating and just do it themselves.
That's what makes open source so great. Go ahead and fork it, but you're not getting the passion or skill or vision as part of the deal.
At some point you have to take a step back and wonder what you thought you were buying by giving the creator any money. This is where it falls apart.
Again, this isn't even stubbornness or selfishness. Negotiation is a skill that only gets tougher the more value is at stake. Most devs can make enough money just fine doing something else and still maintain full control. This is almost exactly why the jobs that pay the best are some of the most meaningless. Nobody is fighting for control over that stuff.
They already have it all just by being themselves. They are the stewards of true value keeping the world from becoming a hellhole foolishly and singularly concerned with money. In other words, if they didn't know something you don't, you wouldn't be offering them money (and only money). :-)
That's really fascinating, thanks. You've given me lots to think about.
I spend a lot of time thinking about the different structures associated with patronage. I remember that at one point David Bowie released a public offering of shares in his future value. If memory serves, the outcomes were mediocre but not a loss.
I actually think that this is kind of awesome. To me, the key detail is modest returns. Every asset class is volatile but our society has taken a really hard turn towards celebrating rent seeking. If someone has capital and can be convinced to give someone the financial leverage that they need to, for example, buy a truck instead of becoming the employee of a guy who bought a fleet of trucks with someone else's money, that's a formula for raising a lot of people up through middle class ranks.
Now, some people would take that advance and go to Vegas and do the least responsible thing, for sure. But I'm into giving people the benefit of doubt when possible.
I don't think we really disagree so much as I'm holding optimism that there are still big ideas and techniques that we haven't thought of, yet. I am guided by a confidence that we are more likely to succeed when we don't assume that things need to work in a certain way.
Low-agency people who've never produced any work of consequence have no frame of reference for what it takes, and therefore, don't give a shit about what it takes to do it (and keep it going amidst their entitlement, indifference, and dismissals).
OSS is just a toxic world burdened by a perpetual war between passive aggression and ego, neither of which will ever "put down their swords."
Kickstarter, Patreon, Etsy and GitHub Sponsors are all very recent inventions. Heck, Youtube being a viable career is an incredibly recent invention.
What I'm saying is that I doubt that any of these are the last word on the topic. Look at how OnlyFans shook up the adult content world, and I don't think that they saw it coming.
I am optimistic that something equally paradigm shifting could occur for makers and OSS maintainers, even if I don't claim to have a vision for how it would work at the moment.
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.
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.
e.g. you can't afford to build your own Drupal from scratch but you can afford to build an SSG from scratch and it may even be simpler than customizing an existing SSG from scratch and dodging the WTF.
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.
Friendly heads-up, because that site looks like you've put in a tremendous amount of time to style it right: The carousels clip the shadows of their children. You could avert that by giving it more inner padding and using negative horizontal margins to counter that :)
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.
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.
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?
This. Totally confusing. Sounded like a very successful campaign, met goal. Why is the rest of that blog post (https://blog.fontawesome.com/pausing-kickstarter/) so negative and like it's a big disappointment? Like Font Awesome was expecting some lengthy constantly growing source of income from it? So weird. (and also, first I'm seeing anything about this or given any reason to pay attention to what Font Awesome is doing despite being a regular user of 11ty and involved with its small ecosystem for years)
And if '11ty devs' aren't big fans of the change etc, then who was rushing to support the Kickstarter? Who's funding this (and why?)
Sounds like they had a much larger actual goal in mind and the low “initial” goal was some kind of calculated marketing trick that didn’t work due to emails landing in spam.
This is how pretty much all big kickstarters work these days - the goal is set artificially low to be able to show off momentum and claim "funded in 24 hours!", and often the initial goal amount is funded by friends and family to further the illusion of success.
Most Kickstarters have a fake low goal so that they can hit it and "blow past it by 1000%!!!" If a Kickstarter hits its goal, but then still cancels, that typically wasn't their real goal.
Maybe fans of font awesome? I backed their first kickstarters a few years ago and got notified about this one now. Possible that enough prior backers were interested enough by the pitch to feed the new one.
And about pausing the kickstarter: only makes sense if the initial goal wasnt the real goal. A successful kickstarter raises more overall money when users jump onboard the successful campaign, so you ask for less than you need to get more than if you asked for how much you really need. Pretty common.
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.
> ChatGPT responds with a fully-populated HTML template. All I have to do is copy and paste it into a new file in my project, run my custom script, and then push the changes.
This actually sounds more troublesome to me than adding a markdown file into a Git repo somewhere, and having Hugo/Astro/whatever automagically regenerate all the HTML files from markdown.
But that's probably because static site hosting services have come very far from the S3 bucket days.
The "build step" with Hugo/Astro might be slightly simpler. But as mentioned in the post, I find it surprisingly nice not to have to write strict Markdown. It turns out (at least for me) that formatting with Markdown still feels akin to creating a finished product. It's nice to just be able to type something out without thinking too much and have the LLM "get what you mean".
Local LLM feels like the wrong tool for a file converter? LLMs shine in natural language processing, but their statistical nature doesn't fit consistent file conversions as more Turing-like programs.
But the text file has some markup syntax beyond human language? Point being LLMs are subpar for acting on formal grammars, like cracking a nut with a sledgehammer. That's why its important tools like 11ty and pandoc remain.
That’s somewhat true (in my case it’s it’s laughably simple though).
I also never said that tools like pandoc are obsolete now. Just in my case they are already overpowered and I might migrate to something simpler soon.
Otoh i might just run the current version of 11ty indefinitely and never upgrade.
I'm also using 11ty on a couple projects, but I abhore the npm ecosystem.
I'm considering letting an LLM generate a flat python script to replace what 11ty does for me. Once removed from the fracas, it should be stable for decades.
Yea I tried Astro but I don’t want to learn their way of doing things, have breaking changes every x months/years and who knows in a couple years they maybe also are screwed.
Pure HTML will work probably forever. Previously it was too much manual work for me to write it but now the LLM just spits it out, easy as
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.
Usually the argument against frameworks is that modularity will cover differing use cases better, unlike a framework that becomes hard the moment you need to do something they didn't design for. I've been ok without frameworks, but not sure yet which way is better.
The most annoying thing I've seen in the JS ecosystem is the in-between, libraries that act more like pieces of a framework. Like you have React and foo which you'd expect to be separate libs, but everyone handles that with a react-foo package. Version compatibility becomes a puzzle once you have 2+ of those.
That's not what the article says. It's about being agnostic what kind of frontend framework/library you use, e.g. giving the users the freedom to choose between React/jQuery, etc..
> 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.
> One minute you are saying large companies use the product, the next that it was always for hobbyists and shouldn't target corporate features?
You are conflating 11ty with Build Awesome (pro)
> That is not a business -- no profit motive.
It is most definitely a business, even if you don't think it will make a lot of money. Also the whole point of comparison is claiming that people will not pay that much money for Build Awesome.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Are you calling a custom mouse icon crap/fuckery that makes you leave the site, or was there something I missed? If you are that's a pretty big overreaction. And it's probably worth you setting the single line to disable `cursor` on all sites via userContent.css or a styling extension.
Yes. There is absolutely no need to do that. And no need for me to take extra steps to undo whatever shit you just smeared on my screen, easier to just close the tab.
Pick a legible font, size, properly contrasting colors, and leave the rest alone.
It has been a while (I think ever since Safari introduced Reader Mode), and I do almost all my reading on websites in Reader Mode. For some websites, I have set to “Use Reader Mode when Available,” such as that of paulgraham.com, daringfireball.net, and quite a few others with horrible Typography.
> I don't understand though why reader mode is not always available. The text is there.
Mostly because we don't have any standard markup to say "this is the content". Which means reader mode has to guess which tags contain the content, and this whole thing boils down to a pair of regexps[1]
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.
> 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.
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.
Great tool, though.
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.
Reminds me that LaTeX has been throwing a depreciation warning for 20+ years on something.
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.
I'm in the same Jekyll boat! If it works, it works.
Much prefer astro.
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.
That was exactly my experience as well, hence I created a "Minimal Astro": https://mastrojs.github.io
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.
Astro is fantastic. And with AI you don't have to deal with the piping much, just force it to have a reasonable opinionated framework at the base.
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
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.
Hah, of course it’s written in Ocaml!
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
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.
[1]: Just be sure to set `htmlTemplateEngine` to 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/
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.
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).
There's a number of headless CMS solutions for commercial websites. Hosted, multi-user, paid. It's just a different category.
That is where headless CMS with Vercel and Netlify partnerships, using Next.js SSG capabilities come into play, regardless how much folks hate them.
> 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.
So bye bye Hugo.
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.
Check out TinaCMS. Works for editing Hugo sites. Not as nice as WordPress admin, but it's good enough for simple editing tasks.
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.
That's the easy part, yes.
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:
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.
Pandoc is your best friend in such cases: https://pandoc.org/
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".
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.
Wordpress has:
* 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.
3rd bullet. I do a ton of WordPress at work. Clients asked for it because they know how to use it.
* live preview
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.
Why would I want my WIP site to be on the public internet? This has been built into Jekyll for years. Probably other SSGs too but I don't know/use them.
Because you're thinking in the context of a solo developer working on their site locally. You don't need a CMS. People that want to collaboratively work on a website, some of which may lack technical skills, need a way of previewing their edits that doesn't involve running shell commands.
You're conflating the two unnecessarily. There's no reason Jekyll's server has to run on the editor's local machine. See my other comment about jekyll-admin which can be used collaboratively: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47737324
I don't see much of a difference between `jekyll serve` and the e.g. `service nginx start && service php-fpm start && service mariadb start` that would be needed to run WordPress. In fact I don't run my WIP Jekyll site on the same machine that I edit from. Mine is available only on my personal mesh VPN, but it could easily be available publicly if I wanted it to be.
I would appreciate getting into more details. As it sounds like a made-up problem to me. Perhaps you don’t understand how simple it is to have a static website as compared to a dynamic one. Especially to some simple project.
You can always reduce complexity by moving the goal posts. In context of the original proposition—that one of the core values WordPress provides is live preview—we have to assume a reasonably complex website authored by multiple people.
Live Preview means, then, that you need to:
There are more constraints and pitfalls that I'm not going to enumerate here. My point is, this stops being simple as soon as you stop being hand wavy about it.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.
WP Engine etc. cost a fortune - tens of thousands per year when you get a lot of traffic - for something that could be served statically for pennies.
Read my other comment. You can very easily use WordPress as just the CMS and still serve static content built from it.
So $30/mo for a secure, globally accessible backend for all of your content editors and pennies to serve it.
what is unique about those hosts with regards to plugin security?
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.
I am a fan of jekyll-admin: https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-admin/
Its project page doesn't seem to have a screenshot of the post/page editor, but its editor is simplemde so one can just look at it directly: https://simplemde.com/
Wordpress can be part of a SSG setup - it's not versus.
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.
The ultimate entitlement is refusing to pay for tooling, while expecting to be getting a paid job as well.
I am hard line on not feeling sorry for projects going away, being taken over by organisations, when it mattered people should have actually sponsored them, instead of bosting how great is to get it all for free/gratis.
Every, single time, someone posts a cool paid project, there is the usual comment why pay, look at MIT/BSD/Apache/... project so and so.
That is true, but nowadays most paid projects end up being perpetual subscriptions. Which I kind of get, as on-going maintenance still costs, but it used to be that you paid for a tool once and only paid again if you wanted/needed an updated version. I'd gladly pay $15-$60 for a tool once (and again if I needed an update) but $10-$15 per month for 20 different things (that I will only use occasionally) is just out of reach for me financially and I live in a "rich" first-world country.
Working for a SaaS company is the greatest thing if you are a software developer who doesn't care about business: even if you don't care about business the business cares about you!
There was an article in Byte magazine circa 1983 describing this dilemma: you release a successful 1.0 of a product, get a pulse of money, hold back some of it to develop 2.0, N months later version 2.0 competes with not only your competitors but with 1.0 in the minds of your most satisfied customers. Now if you're planning for N months and it is really N+M they have to scramble for money to pay your paycheck or release the product before it is ready or both. If you're laid off you could be one of the lucky ones because working under those conditions can be a living hell.
I'm glad I'm working on a service because even if a project I am working on is critical to acquiring and retaining customers it's not an automatic crisis that a project is a little late.
In the last 10 years or so SaaS seems like an investor-driven fad driven by the ease of putting a valuation on a consistent cashflow, but I think it is more basic than that.
That's not to say that the 'anti-consumer' concerns aren't real. Also with generative AI we are seeing that some things need to account for the resources they use. In the 2010s I was looking at a family of proto-AI businesses where my business partner and I were struggling with pricing, like we could not set an $X/month price such that (i) some users might not cost 10$X or 100$X a month to serve and (ii) that $X doesn't exceed the value the subscriber would get from the service for many users thus you don't make the sale. Yet we also liked the idea of stable revenue and boy all the software biz people and investors we talked to couldn't see past the "S, M, L, XL" subscription model.
How do you imagine it used to be when everything was commercial?
On the plus side, at least there wasn't that many magpie development, and rewrites just because.
Subscriptions are the only way to fix piracy.
> Subscriptions are the only way to fix piracy.
If you're trying to make people cheer for the pirates, you're succeeding.
Some people will never pay, even if it was one euro, single payment.
Yeah. Because they're 14 and don't have a credit card, or they don't have any money, or the price is completely unaffordable (looking at you, IDA) or they hate your software and wish your company would DIAF but are forced to use it for various reasons anyway.
You might as well be nice to the people who will give you money, so that they'll give you money. Being hostile to people who are trying to give you money is rarely a winning business strategy.
All good reasons, except when it comes from people that can afford Apple, feel entitled to get gratis stuff, never pay anything else, and then come to complain on HN that another project died.
Programs were distributed on stacks of diskettes, towards the end of that era on CD-ROMs. There was no licence server to phone home to on the internet.
You bought Borland C++ compiler, installed it and used it - you were free to buy the next version when it came out or not.
There are plenty of programs where you can still do that, that gladly accept one time license payment.
However think on your own salary and how many copies you need to sell, at what price, per month, to receive the same monetary amount after taxes.
Add to it, the amount of new user acquisitions per month, to keep a sustainable salary level.
You’re right about that. But now put the users in the equation. If you’re making and marketing a B2B tool, it’s fine. But for a B2C tool, that tool will have to be so good that people will be willing to keep paying an ongoing subscription. That means that you’re now also competing against other cheaper alternatives (OSS) and people’s other life expenses (including other subscriptions).
It depends on the niche you’re targeting but I’d go as far as to say it might sometimes be better to sell 100 copies at once every now and then, than get 5-10 people who are willing to subscribe and might all cancel their subscriptions a few months later when some other subscription-based tool shows up. For most people it’s easier to justify a one-time $10 purchase than locking in a $10 monthly subscription.
But I agree that there’s no universal solution and it depends on what tool you’re making and in what niche.
> Subscriptions are the only way to fix piracy.
I'm not so sure. If they can't pay for a one-time purchase, they won't be able to afford a subscription. Subscriptions are always more expensive in the end, that's why they exist in the first place. I don't see how people not using the software while still not becoming customers is a fix to anything.
Subscriptions look cheaper for many folks.
As for being able to afford them, yes it cuts people out, many of whom would pirated anyway.
Digital stores, API keys, and SaaS seem to be doing alright
Subscriptions can be cheaper in some ways and more expensive than others.
Adobe Creative Suite used to require a one time eye-watering payment and very few people could afford to keep it up to date, you might skip several upgrades before buying the next one if you did at all.
CC's monthly payment makes it easy to enter. You are paying more in the long term than if you bought one version of it, but less than you'd pay if you kept your subscription up -- so somebody could make the case that it is more expensive than it used to be or less expensive than it used to be.
> Subscriptions are the only way to fix piracy.
Adobe tools are subscriptions and they get pirated all the time.
They do, as did Autocad with key locks, the point is to make it harder, as long as it runs locally, there is always a way.
"Rent-seeking is the only way to fix piracy" is an interesting take.
It seems to be going very well for video and music streaming services. Piracy is certainly nearly dead at this point and not at all at record-high levels.
The sarcastic tone ignores that was much worse during Napster golden days.
I agree with you in spirit. I also think back to that moment a few years ago where everyone suddenly realized that OpenSSL was being developed almost entirely by one dude with very, very little funding. Fundamental building blocks of modern society that might fail because some poor guy worked himself to death in obscurity because he didn't know how to better ask for help. We should all be haunted by this and consciously urge our employers to be part of the solution and not the problem.
That tangent aside, part of the big problem with paying for tooling is that the tooling itself is typically built on tooling and libraries that are also built on libraries and tooling.... all the way down. To generalize, many of those libraries farthest back in the chain are the least likely to get the sort of funding someone who, eg. writes a wrapper around ffmpeg or whatever might get.
I don't claim to have the solution, but I feel like this topic is the tech equivalent of not worrying about global warming.
If you open an old Byte or Dr Dobbs magazine, it will be full of ads from companies whose business was utility libraries.
Wait, are you saying that all of my VBXs are likely unsupported at this point?
Yeah, should have migrated to VB.NET by now.
Dev Express, Sync Fusion, Component Source,.... are still around.
Neither side can have it both ways, but there's way too much whining about people not paying.
Want people to pay for your tools? Don't offer them for free.
This is related to my usual point here, that if one offers something for free under a GPL or MIT license, claiming to do so for the betterment of humanity, only to later retract it because corporations profit without paying or AI companies use it for model training, that person is an entitled liar who released proprietary software while using openness and generosity as a marketing strategy.
Proprietary software is fine. Lying about it and using good ideals as marketing strategy is not. That applies as much to "released as MIT so it be useful to many, then unreleased because author realized it might end up in training data of some LLMs (and in so doing, actually become useful to many people)" software, as it does to blogs and all the whining about AI denying them credit (and pre-AI, search engines, except then the developer community was on side of search and not free-but-with-ads/credit publishers).
> Every, single time, someone posts a cool paid project, there is the usual comment why pay, look at MIT/BSD/Apache/... project so and so.
That comes from some combination of the project looking not worth a cent, probably not working (at least not for the use case intended), payments being a big step starting a real multi-party relationship, much distinct from just looking at a webpage or playing with code locally, and the poster being a student or younger.
I too strongly favored MIT over everything when I was a kid. Didn't have money to pay for anything, and GPL was complicated and my slightly older colleagues (with probably more business sense than I) didn't like it.
So much of people's thinking today makes no sense to me.
Since 2010 there has been an increasing tendency for the likes of Google and Facebook to drain an increasing fraction out of the value out of the web. Around 2012 I had a site that was expensive to host and bleeding money and looking for ways to salvage it and realized that there were many crawlers that were hitting my site hard, harder than Google, and almost all of them, like Chinese webcrawlers, were sending me 0 traffic and making 0 value for me. So I cut them off. Bing was practically in that category, sending barely detectable traffic, but I wanted to support some competition for Google.
As I saw it a few years ago a bunch of people were apoplectic about OpenAI all of a sudden and I'm like, boy they are asleep at the switch, boy are they running in a herd, boy are they slamming on the breaks the next day after they crash their car. I mean like 10 years before that my wife was furious at me because I ran up a balance on our HELOC because of Google trouble.
> if one offers something for free under a GPL or MIT license, claiming to do so for the betterment of humanity, only to later retract it because corporations profit without paying or AI companies use it for model training
Both the GPL and MIT licenses require attribution, so by publishing open-source software, developers are not consenting to LLM training.
> if one offers something for free under a GPL or MIT license, claiming to do so for the betterment of humanity, only to later retract it
I would wager that an overwhelming majority of people who choose FOSS licenses do so without ever making any grandiose claims about the betterment of humanity. Yet upon any suggestion of a license change, if the project is popular, they get attacked for being a lying scheming rug-puller all the same.
> that person is an entitled liar who released proprietary software while using openness and generosity as a marketing strategy
Why do you automatically assume they're a liar, and not just someone whose circumstances or opinions changed over time? Or just responding to changes in the competitive landscape or business cycle?
If you release FOSS software, it seems your only socially acceptable options are to keep future versions FOSS forever, or abandon the project entirely if/when your circumstances no longer permit FOSS development. How is that state of affairs beneficial to anyone?
> Proprietary software is fine.
I agree, but our industry also has a vocal minority of open source purists, who treat anything using non-OSI-approved licenses as toxic waste -- even software using a quite generous source-available license.
For B2C software, that situation is manageable: the purists simply won't touch the software, and will loudly pan it on forums like HN, but plenty of others will try it if it's useful.
But for B2B software, it's more problematic, since there are enough open source purists out there that most tech companies employ at least a few, influencing corporate policy about acceptable licenses. If a new B2B software product has no OSI-approved FOSS edition at all, the purists tend to majorly tank adoption, which hugely impacts the business viability of the product.
So if you're bootstrapping a new B2B infrastructure product that doesn't lend itself to SaaS, what license do you pick? If you go FOSS, you severely limit the economic viability of your own work. Or if you go non-FOSS, you severely limit adoption, which then has the same outcome.
> That comes from some combination of the project looking not worth a cent, probably not working (at least not for the use case intended), payments being a big step
If it was just about money/payments, then non-OSI "source available" licenses would be far more popular, especially ones that allow the software to be used free/gratis for all situations that don't directly compete with the software creator. Yet instead the widespread attitude towards these licenses seems to be far more mixed. How do you explain that phenomenon?
I want Zach to be paid, 11ty is my favourite SSG. I think the way Font Awesome is going about this is unwise. I contribute to the Open Collective of 11ty (as I state in my post). I don't know how that can be misread.
Idk if it's fair to characterise someone helping build a "community-driven directory to help people discover and connect with grassroots organizations, clubs, activist groups, and community initiatives" as "working for $5/hour to help get local businesses online". It's akin to complaining that pro-bono work devalues the profession of law.
It feels like there is entitlement on both sides. People who do OSS work feel entitled to financial benefits, despite explicitly choosing to give their work away for free. And people who consume open source software feel entitled to unpaid labor in perpetuity. It kind of sucks on both ends.
Rich Hickey wrote an essay titled "Open Source is Not About You" [0], where he states "As a user of something open source you are not thereby entitled to anything at all. You are not entitled to contribute. You are not entitled to features. You are not entitled to the attention of others. You are not entitled to having value attached to your complaints. You are not entitled to this explanation."
This is true. Unequivocally. What is also true is that OSS is also not about the contributors. They aren't owed anything by the consumers. They aren't entitled to any compensation, and they aren't entitled to others putting effort into making their contributions sustainable, helping them make a living wage, or alleviating burnout. We're all adults here, we can stop working on something if it's causing us pain or suffering. And we can freely fork a project if it's going in a direction we don't agree. That is the nature of open source. It's just a licensing model, which only exists because of certain laws. Otherwise, it's just a decision on what is public and private. Nothing more.
So if a project isn't going in the direction you want? Shut up and fork it. Not getting paid for your work? Find a way to monetise it or move on. Don't whine about either of these things on the internet.
0: https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba95...
You make some excellent points, but what I think your perspective lacks is empathy. This stuff is so complicated.
If someone starts working on a project in college and 3-4 years later it blows up, they might now have a young family to consider. The person working on this thing that people love is no longer the same person who started it. In other words: life happened. Perspectives change.
It's also kind of pointless to deny human nature and we should at least try to assume best intentions; it's one thing to say all of the Rich Hickey stuff, and you might even believe it at the beginning of a project. X years later when someone raises $20M to build a company around the best parts of what you did and often forgets to mention you in the origin story... I suspect that would mess with you, and all of that stuff about entitlement would start to feel a bit thin. I don't begrudge people for those emotions, because it's not my place to do so and I see myself in their imperfect-ness.
Ultimately, I am optimistic that we will continue to establish better and better ways to create sustainable projects with maintainers that are compensated for their efforts.
Well, if you confronted me with an individual case of course I would feel empathy. That wouldn't change that I think they have incorrect ideas about open source, but I also wouldn't judge them either.
My point is more that people should try to have more realistic views about open source. People aren't obligated to credit your MIT licensed code (beyond the licence file) and you should be clear on that when you chose that licence. Heck, I've seen OSS maintainers outraged because someone forked their code, despite prominently crediting the source [0]. Some people consider that "bad form", in the same way people might consider monetising something previously open source to be "bad form". I think in both cases, people should just choose more appropriate licences. Can't have your cake and eat it too.
I think Hecrj put it well here:
> 'Me giving away more "free gifts" cannot ever be considered "competing" with someone else that is also giving away "free gifts". The only way for someone to conclude that is if the original gifts are not truly "free", but come with some "hidden" expectations attached to them.'
If you believe that there are expectations attached to your code, you should choose a licence congruent to those expectations. Trying to enforce that through culture is probably a bad idea and will lead to strife.
> Ultimately, I am optimistic that we will continue to establish better and better ways to create sustainable projects with maintainers that are compensated for their efforts.
Yes, I hope so too.
0: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/issues/19296#issuecomment...
That link is a strong argument to support your position, no question. On this class of example, we have no disagreement. Those folks appear to have missed the seminar where they explain how this whole OSS thing works.
That said, I've said irrationally defensive things to people abusing my code when I'm tired and depressed, too. These are called passion projects for good reasons.
Where I would lodge disagreement is that I reject the notion that OSS is this pure, primeval mana which is made less righteous when people remember that they need money for rent. I don't think we should encourage people to see countless hours of volunteer effort as undeserving of financial support. I believe that OSS gets better when people are well compensated for contributing to it.
I respect the folks who are able to do it, but I resist the side-eye these folks often deliver when they hear someone is looking for a way to keep the lights on.
I agree with all that
I agree with Rich Hickey in that. I use Debian a lot, but i am fully aware i am not entitled to any sort of free support when things don’t go i want them to go. I get what i pay for. If i want things to go my way i will have to make the effort myself. By investing time and/or money.
> I truly don't understand how the same folks…
Why do you think it’s the same folks? People tend to be louder when they don’t agree with something, and many topics will divide a community mostly in half. The end result is that you will more than likely hear complaints and subtle digs/insults no matter what happens.
> 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
I know you don't want to hear the obvious, but making your passion your paycheck is a one-way ticket to burnout. Even your heroes are still human.
The passion is the magic, and keeping it going requires contrast with something else as a day job. You really don't want to know the pain of losing both because they're one and the same. Burnout is not inevitable nor inherent to age or experience. It's actually the opposite if you set proper boundaries and get a grip.
That said, what's the deal with this topic coming up over and over? Is it just coming from young people too afraid of the broader working world, or is it something more sinister? Is this opinion being propagated by bad actors trying to take advantage of young people wanting to work this way (the "rockstar" delusion)?
You make some excellent points. Especially wrt how the fastest way to hate what you love is to rely upon it to pay the bills.
That said, I do feel as though you're presenting a nuanced topic as a false dichotomy. There's lots of people who have figured out how to build something sustainable that blurs the line between occupation and enjoyment. We only tend to pathologize when talking about folks who haven't figured out how to make what they created into a flywheel.
The real trick is to figure out a viable structure to fund a lot more projects. Kickstarter, Patreon, Etsy, even GitHub Sponsors are steps in a positive direction. Things really are better for builders than they were 20 years ago. That should be celebrated.
Yet, I think it's very likely that there's something just as disruptive (in a positive way) for OSS and makers in general as, for example, OnlyFans was for adult content that we just haven't stumbled on yet. So when I implore the person who wrote the OP to focus on solutions, this is broadly what I was hoping for.
> presenting a nuanced topic as a false dichotomy
I respectfully, but very strongly disagree. There is nothing good that comes from corrupting someone's passion project by attaching strings to it.
> Kickstarter, Patreon, Etsy, even GitHub Sponsors are steps in a positive direction
I would take a huge step back from that statement and have a harder think, but that's just me.
You're saying that you fundamentally object to people figuring out how to make something that they created sustainable?
I clearly don't feel this way, but I'm earnestly curious to hear why you do!
Making something sustainable is a different problem and a different set of skills.
I have nothing against anyone who wants to do both. I'm just saying some variant of what I'm thinking has to be why it's not as popular as you want or expect.
Something else worth considering is that people can actually be much better at (and better off) doing things they're not so passionate about.
This isn't just about devs being precious about their feelings or capacity to work. It's about control. Corrupting the direction of the project was my original point and where most of my disagreement comes from.
I would not expect most workers in any field to be so naive. The amount of convincing and money it usually takes to get someone to give up control is necessarily greater than what it was originally worth to that person. More often than not, creative people are also sophisticated enough to see that they may not fully appreciate the meaning of their project longer term right now, and the default answer has to be "no" possibly forever.
Someone asking a creative person to give even an inch of control is the one in need, not the other way around. They have to be on the creative person's level to get anywhere. Even just simple collaboration or discussion can be difficult if they don't feel it's fair. This is a very tall order and at that point they might as well stop begging and manipulating and just do it themselves.
That's what makes open source so great. Go ahead and fork it, but you're not getting the passion or skill or vision as part of the deal.
At some point you have to take a step back and wonder what you thought you were buying by giving the creator any money. This is where it falls apart.
Again, this isn't even stubbornness or selfishness. Negotiation is a skill that only gets tougher the more value is at stake. Most devs can make enough money just fine doing something else and still maintain full control. This is almost exactly why the jobs that pay the best are some of the most meaningless. Nobody is fighting for control over that stuff.
They already have it all just by being themselves. They are the stewards of true value keeping the world from becoming a hellhole foolishly and singularly concerned with money. In other words, if they didn't know something you don't, you wouldn't be offering them money (and only money). :-)
That's really fascinating, thanks. You've given me lots to think about.
I spend a lot of time thinking about the different structures associated with patronage. I remember that at one point David Bowie released a public offering of shares in his future value. If memory serves, the outcomes were mediocre but not a loss.
I actually think that this is kind of awesome. To me, the key detail is modest returns. Every asset class is volatile but our society has taken a really hard turn towards celebrating rent seeking. If someone has capital and can be convinced to give someone the financial leverage that they need to, for example, buy a truck instead of becoming the employee of a guy who bought a fleet of trucks with someone else's money, that's a formula for raising a lot of people up through middle class ranks.
Now, some people would take that advance and go to Vegas and do the least responsible thing, for sure. But I'm into giving people the benefit of doubt when possible.
I don't think we really disagree so much as I'm holding optimism that there are still big ideas and techniques that we haven't thought of, yet. I am guided by a confidence that we are more likely to succeed when we don't assume that things need to work in a certain way.
Low-agency people who've never produced any work of consequence have no frame of reference for what it takes, and therefore, don't give a shit about what it takes to do it (and keep it going amidst their entitlement, indifference, and dismissals).
OSS is just a toxic world burdened by a perpetual war between passive aggression and ego, neither of which will ever "put down their swords."
> but I wish they would channel their frustrations into helping to find a sustainable model for OSS creators to make a living wage
What are some ways that one might do this?
Kickstarter, Patreon, Etsy and GitHub Sponsors are all very recent inventions. Heck, Youtube being a viable career is an incredibly recent invention.
What I'm saying is that I doubt that any of these are the last word on the topic. Look at how OnlyFans shook up the adult content world, and I don't think that they saw it coming.
I am optimistic that something equally paradigm shifting could occur for makers and OSS maintainers, even if I don't claim to have a vision for how it would work at the moment.
Jacob Kaplan-Moss, February 2024: https://social.jacobian.org/@jacob/111914179201102152
> “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”
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.
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.
I wish them the best.
e.g. you can't afford to build your own Drupal from scratch but you can afford to build an SSG from scratch and it may even be simpler than customizing an existing SSG from scratch and dodging the WTF.
It's interesting to contrast that with other disciplines.
Like, you can't afford to build your own Unreal Engine from scratch, but most can't afford to build their own game engine from scratch either.
But site builders are just string concatenation, and CMSs are just CRUD. We overcomplicate it to the moon and back.
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.
Friendly heads-up, because that site looks like you've put in a tremendous amount of time to style it right: The carousels clip the shadows of their children. You could avert that by giving it more inner padding and using negative horizontal margins to counter that :)
Thanks! Just fixed it - that did the trick...
How comes there are only three oils from Greece listed? They are like the OGs in this game!
Well spotted! I'm leaving the OG's like Greece, Spain and Italy till last so I can do them justice.
38d ago by OP (5 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47247541
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
Aside, but related: wish this had been shared around here last month when it broke.
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)
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.
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.
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?
This. Totally confusing. Sounded like a very successful campaign, met goal. Why is the rest of that blog post (https://blog.fontawesome.com/pausing-kickstarter/) so negative and like it's a big disappointment? Like Font Awesome was expecting some lengthy constantly growing source of income from it? So weird. (and also, first I'm seeing anything about this or given any reason to pay attention to what Font Awesome is doing despite being a regular user of 11ty and involved with its small ecosystem for years)
And if '11ty devs' aren't big fans of the change etc, then who was rushing to support the Kickstarter? Who's funding this (and why?)
Sounds like they had a much larger actual goal in mind and the low “initial” goal was some kind of calculated marketing trick that didn’t work due to emails landing in spam.
This is how pretty much all big kickstarters work these days - the goal is set artificially low to be able to show off momentum and claim "funded in 24 hours!", and often the initial goal amount is funded by friends and family to further the illusion of success.
Most Kickstarters have a fake low goal so that they can hit it and "blow past it by 1000%!!!" If a Kickstarter hits its goal, but then still cancels, that typically wasn't their real goal.
Maybe fans of font awesome? I backed their first kickstarters a few years ago and got notified about this one now. Possible that enough prior backers were interested enough by the pitch to feed the new one.
And about pausing the kickstarter: only makes sense if the initial goal wasnt the real goal. A successful kickstarter raises more overall money when users jump onboard the successful campaign, so you ask for less than you need to get more than if you asked for how much you really need. Pretty common.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who can’t figure out what’s going on with this project and the cancellation.
I came to the Hacker News comments thinking someone might have more information but I still don’t understand.
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.
Yes, I find LLMs are great for taking loosely-structured text and turning them into formatted blog posts. https://notes.npilk.com/chatgpt-is-my-ssg
From your post:
> ChatGPT responds with a fully-populated HTML template. All I have to do is copy and paste it into a new file in my project, run my custom script, and then push the changes.
This actually sounds more troublesome to me than adding a markdown file into a Git repo somewhere, and having Hugo/Astro/whatever automagically regenerate all the HTML files from markdown.
But that's probably because static site hosting services have come very far from the S3 bucket days.
The "build step" with Hugo/Astro might be slightly simpler. But as mentioned in the post, I find it surprisingly nice not to have to write strict Markdown. It turns out (at least for me) that formatting with Markdown still feels akin to creating a finished product. It's nice to just be able to type something out without thinking too much and have the LLM "get what you mean".
Local LLM feels like the wrong tool for a file converter? LLMs shine in natural language processing, but their statistical nature doesn't fit consistent file conversions as more Turing-like programs.
I'm sure you know about pandoc for translating markdown into html (and all it's other tricks).
Yea but that still requires a non-zero amount of time to setup and most importantly maintain and keep up to date.
Pure HTML generated from a text file just works and probably will forever.
I mean it’s just my personal website which is mostly just for me to look up things quickly / personal wiki
But the text file has some markup syntax beyond human language? Point being LLMs are subpar for acting on formal grammars, like cracking a nut with a sledgehammer. That's why its important tools like 11ty and pandoc remain.
That’s somewhat true (in my case it’s it’s laughably simple though).
I also never said that tools like pandoc are obsolete now. Just in my case they are already overpowered and I might migrate to something simpler soon. Otoh i might just run the current version of 11ty indefinitely and never upgrade.
I'm also using 11ty on a couple projects, but I abhore the npm ecosystem.
I'm considering letting an LLM generate a flat python script to replace what 11ty does for me. Once removed from the fracas, it should be stable for decades.
If using an LLM why bother with python? Go for straight shell scripts.
That’s exactly my plan. Too burned out on the npm ecosystem. I don’t have time to update all that shit constantly for a fucking static HTML page
Exactly, so many people reach for these complex toolings and ecosystems.
Their static pages are just a bunch of fucking text files you can print with some CLI commands.
Wouldn't Astro work great here though?
Just a static sites without JavaScript but you still get some nice things like scoped CSS, components and being able to use markdown for blog posts.
Yea I tried Astro but I don’t want to learn their way of doing things, have breaking changes every x months/years and who knows in a couple years they maybe also are screwed.
Pure HTML will work probably forever. Previously it was too much manual work for me to write it but now the LLM just spits it out, easy as
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.
Usually the argument against frameworks is that modularity will cover differing use cases better, unlike a framework that becomes hard the moment you need to do something they didn't design for. I've been ok without frameworks, but not sure yet which way is better.
The most annoying thing I've seen in the JS ecosystem is the in-between, libraries that act more like pieces of a framework. Like you have React and foo which you'd expect to be separate libs, but everyone handles that with a react-foo package. Version compatibility becomes a puzzle once you have 2+ of those.
> Why does the JavaScript ecosystem pride itself in not having a framework? That’s the very thing that drove me out of the ecosystem.
I don't think that claim's anywhere in the article.
Some people do take pride in how JavaScript has come a long way from the jQuery days.
That's not what the article says. It's about being agnostic what kind of frontend framework/library you use, e.g. giving the users the freedom to choose between React/jQuery, etc..
Reminding me of the Shoelace [0] project, which was rebranded as Web Awesome. The original (v2) repository was then archived.
[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.
> One minute you are saying large companies use the product, the next that it was always for hobbyists and shouldn't target corporate features?
You are conflating 11ty with Build Awesome (pro)
> That is not a business -- no profit motive. It is most definitely a business, even if you don't think it will make a lot of money. Also the whole point of comparison is claiming that people will not pay that much money for Build Awesome.
I made a Paul Graham static site generator: https://shawwn.github.io/pg
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).
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.
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'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.
In case anyone wondered, the title is a play on the Isaac Asimov book "The End of Eternity": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Eternity
No, it's not. Just because there's a book named similarly doesn't mean this post is a reference to it.
it's clearly a reference to the end of evangelion
how do you figure?
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.
Also sounds a bit like Joel Spolsky's desktop app CityDesk from back in the day.
Dreamweaver still exists.
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.
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.
if anyone is wondering, the photo is of the old deutz works in cologne
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.
> 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/
Sadly the life of many things frontend.
TLDR: Lookup Sveltia CMS
> 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.
Sveltia CMS looks good!
[flagged]
Didn't read because of the fuckery with the mouse pointer. Why do sites have to do this crap.
Are you calling a custom mouse icon crap/fuckery that makes you leave the site, or was there something I missed? If you are that's a pretty big overreaction. And it's probably worth you setting the single line to disable `cursor` on all sites via userContent.css or a styling extension.
Yes. There is absolutely no need to do that. And no need for me to take extra steps to undo whatever shit you just smeared on my screen, easier to just close the tab.
Pick a legible font, size, properly contrasting colors, and leave the rest alone.
It has been a while (I think ever since Safari introduced Reader Mode), and I do almost all my reading on websites in Reader Mode. For some websites, I have set to “Use Reader Mode when Available,” such as that of paulgraham.com, daringfireball.net, and quite a few others with horrible Typography.
Same here. Even this article wasn't that comfortable to read, so had to use Reader Mode.
I don't understand though why reader mode is not always available. The text is there.
> I don't understand though why reader mode is not always available. The text is there.
Mostly because we don't have any standard markup to say "this is the content". Which means reader mode has to guess which tags contain the content, and this whole thing boils down to a pair of regexps[1]
[1]: https://github.com/mozilla/readability/blob/08be6b4bdb204dd3...
Guess I'll make this a habit and find a similar auto-Reader-Mode feature in Firefox. I like my cursor just the way it is.
You can turn it off, there's a little toggle at the bottom of the page.