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Comment by bgrohman | Hacker News Reader

It looks nice, but I guess I still[1] don’t understand the proliferation of simple static site generators. It’s pretty easy (and fun!) to build your own that works exactly as you want it to. And I don’t think a static site generator is suitable for non-technical users. Is there an in-between type of user technical enough to use a static site generator but not able to write their own? Or maybe the proliferation is only because they are both easy and fun to create?

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14877298

Edit: I didn’t intend for this to sound negative for the creator. Even if it’s just for fun and the chance someone else might find it useful, that’s enough of a reason to build it for me.

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Learning how to program, especially when one doesn't come about it through self-selected autodidactism, can often seem to be an insurmountable challenge to people who don't know how.

This applies to even extremely technical, highly intelligent people. Often they recognize that there's an extraordinary time component to learning, and they optimize around that in other ways.

Learning to program is a weird thing because once you learn the mental processes of how to do it, it comes fairly easily. But the idea of "I'd like a tool that makes websites for me" and then knowing how to divide that problem down to the right mental abstraction model that perfectly (or near perfectly fits) some programming language and technical environment is a very difficult learning curve.

It's much simpler then to present small technical pieces that are well constrained in scope and definition and have tooling somebody else built do all the rest of the heavy lifting.

Static site generators are one of those things that are relatively easy, even for newish programmers, to build, but exist right on the other side of that learning curve for non-programmers.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply.

Also, as a non-front end developer, I don't have HTML fresh in my mind and don't care to. Sometimes you just want to do something quick and not have to worry about it.

>It looks nice, but I guess I still don’t understand the proliferation of simple static site generators. It’s pretty easy (and fun!) to build your own that works exactly as you want it to.

Notice how these two sentences are contradictory -- or rather how the second explains what the first supposedly can't understand.

If it's "pretty easy and fun" to build X, then that would inevitably lead to a "proliferation of" X projects.

It just takes a person that built one to then share their implementation on GitHub to increase that proliferation, and that's a very simple additional step.

And it just takes any person who understands "opportunity cost" to want to adopt an existing static site generator rather than build their own.

Both kinds are in abundance.

Yep, thanks, I realized that eventually :)

I fall into the category of a technical user who could build their own, however I use existing ones as:

- It's faster and I already have more fun projects than my time allows.

- I don't particularly enjoy writing HTML/CSS (though the rest of the project would be fun).

- I'm happier using an existing template rather than making my own. I know I'll be too critical of the design if I do it myself.

Gotcha, makes sense. My question seems a little short-sighted in retrospect :)

>It looks nice, but I guess I still[1] don’t understand the proliferation of simple static site generators. It’s pretty easy (and fun!) to build your own that works exactly as you want it to.

I don't think that's true. It looks deceptively easy up front but the subtleties involved actually make it pretty hard. I've tried hugo, jekyll and pelican and they've all pissed me off for one reason or another. A common issue involves one of the 'template' themes I found on their template theme libraries not working on the "latest" version of the generator.

Ivy seems to have "solved" this problem by having almost no themes. This is not exactly the solution I was thinking of...

There's still a gap in the market here I think, and there will continue to be a proliferation (like how there was with bad javascript toolsets until jquery 'won' ~2007-8) until somebody makes an acceptably 'good' one or fixes an existing one until it obviously stands head and shoulders above the rest.

If you can make a well designed static site generator with lots of nice themes (or the potential for that) that doesn't fail horribly when I try to use it in a normal fashion I'd switch to it in a heartbeat and tell all of my friends. I'm using hugo now, but I'm not super happy about it: last problem with that being that I couldn't get it to competently handle breadcrumb navigation.

It makes sense that the static site generators with lots of bells an whistles are harder to get right, especially if they’re trying to build an ecosystem with plugins and themes where others can contribute. I’m considering the _simple_ generators like the one posted here, though. My original thought/question was why not just write your own if you have a simple use case? There have been some good answers here such as no programming knowledge, lack of experience with html/css, or wanting to spend your time on other projects.

I think even "simple" generators are harder than they look. Plus, those 'bell and whistle' features quickly end up becoming critical once you scale up from a few pages.

Also yea, don't really want to do CSS and web design just to put a bit of content online. Hence why these things exist.

> Ivy seems to have "solved" this problem by having almost no themes. This is not exactly the solution I was thinking of...

Yes, it really is a chicken-egg problem where I think you need to start with at least a half-dozen attractive themes to get attention.

Theme designers are not going to build themes for a site generator that nobody uses. And nobody (relatively) is going to use a site generator that has only a "document" theme.

Generators like Hugo, for whatever their faults, have dozens of really nice-looking themes so it's easy to find something close to what you want and either use it as-is or make some minor tweaks.

I don't think the chicken-egg problem is that bad, the themes are all open source and you can port them. Many exist for a few generators.

A lot of the themes on generators like Hugo are ugly or don't work too.

Probably porting a group of 10 nice ones would be enough.

I'm one of those people who falls into that group -- I can, and have, used a static site generator, but have nearly zero programming knowledge so couldn't make one of my own. The biggest issue I have now is choosing which one to use. I've mostly used Hugo, with good results, but always have that slight niggle wondering if there's something that would work a bit better for me.

Cool, thanks for the reply. Good to know you have plenty of options.

That’s the same for me. While I consider myself to be fairly technical, I’m not a programmer. Given enough time and googling I could probably write my own, but it would be a struggle.

However I’ve had lots of success building sites with Jekyll and love the speed with which it’s possible to get something up and running.

Static site generators are more than suitable for non-tech users - they used to be called Macromedia Dreamweaver, Microsoft FrontPage; etc.

I'd very much like to see fullon wysiwyg static generators again; it could replace half, if not more, of the WordPress sites around.

Yeah, you’re right - I forgot about Dreamweaver and similar tools. I do think that adding wysiwyg UIs to a generator puts it in a slightly different class than the type of generator posted here, but your point is a good one. Adding a UI to a simple generator would make it much easier for non-technical people to use.

Static site generators are very WYSIWYG friendly, see my comment above about our Jekyll and Hugo CMS. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16254696

I've a site deployed using Lektor[0] for a slightly technically inclined user, who gets a UI to edit his site and when ready to publish, just click the button.

[0] https://www.getlektor.com/

I think if people dedicated time to creating one for their own use it can be done (I am decent at Python and I would like to think that I can too) but at the same time I don't want to much around with HTML and particularly CSS.

I use static generators purely by available themes because that's the part that I hate the most.

We're helping bridge the gap for non-technical users with our Jekyll and Hugo CMS (https://forestry.io). There are many other options too, just check out https://headlesscms.org.

It's an exciting time to be a web developer. We have many static site generators (like this one) to help build super performant sites, we can host them in the cloud for a negligible cost, and we can keep everything in Git.

>Is there an in-between type of user technical enough to use a static site generator but not able to write their own? Or maybe the proliferation is only because they are both easy and fun to create?

Not sure if you mean to ask why people don't create their own static sites (without generators), or did you mean dynamic sites using PHP/Ruby/Python?

For the argument over dynamic sites:

Yes - the type that does not want to worry about security vulnerabilities.

My blog is made via a static site generator. I updated infrequently (once every so many months). I want to have it up and running for years without my intervention (i.e. maintenance).

I once had a Wordpress blog and treated it that way. It was hacked.

Then I built my own in Django. Then at some time it went down because my service provider updated Python libraries, etc.

The funny thing is: Using a static site generator is no more work, and has no fewer advantages. Why should I use a dynamic site or build my own?

For the argument against static sites, well then you'd have to maintain lots of links manually. A SSG gives you a lot of that for free. And you can use templates.

Hi, thanks, that all makes sense. I was asking why there are so many static site generators and why you wouldn’t just create a custom static site generator yourself, not why you would use one. I use one myself. Based on some of the other replies, I can see that there are use cases for not creating your own - when you aren’t a programmer, or when you don’t know or care to learn html and css, or when an existing generator already does all that you need.

>I was asking why there are so many static site generators and why you wouldn’t just create a custom static site generator yourself,

Because there are an unlimited number of things to create, and only a finite time in your life?

>Is there an in-between type of user technical enough to use a static site generator but not able to write their own?

A lot of people who want pretty websites without writing or learning a lick of frontend technologies.

Gotcha, that makes sense. I hadn’t considered programmers who don’t know html/css and don’t care to learn it.

I agree it can be fun. And lots of us probably have written such systems ourselves. However, even for those of us who could write one, sometimes you just want to use a tool, not write it and worry about bugs and new features constantly. A good pluggable static site generator can potentially give you a lot more featues than something you write yourself.

I find the features of Jekyll important; I use it for client projects and mock up designs. While I don't like everything about how it's structured and I've written my own for fun, it'd be a lot of work on my part to create and maintain something equivalent.

> I guess I still[1] don’t understand the proliferation of simple static site generators

> It’s pretty easy (and fun!) to build your own

Seems like you answered your own question. :)

Yes, indeed. My original thought was more along the lines of why there are so many generators published to solve the same problem when it’s easy to create your own custom generator as needed. Add one more step - publish your custom generator online in case it’s useful for others - and now you see the proliferation. Makes perfect sense now :)

Sure, I could write my own. But, for god's sake, why? My time is too precious to spend on all things that I could do on my own.

Writing your own can be a good way to learn a new language as well as a good introduction to html/css if you’re new to it. Also, if you write it yourself (again, for _simple_ use cases), it’ll do exactly what you need and no more. Evidently, a lot of people have found reasons to write their own, including the author of this one - hence the proliferation of simple static site generators.

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