Comment by indigochill | Hacker News Reader

Comment by indigochill | Hacker News Reader

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Definitely this. I've had a Wordpress site for years that I've let sit dormant. Recently I got the "I should build a personal site" bug, but rather than jump on Wordpress I set up a Github Pages site and just put a redirect on my Wordpress site to that one. Why?

1. Static is secure. Wordpress is a notorious target for hackers and I see constant attacks even against my empty, worthless Wordpress site. But you can't attack a site that doesn't take any input or perform any logic besides choosing which page to display.

2. Markdown is simple and does the job. I don't need anything fancy to write my thoughts and link to resources I find useful.

3. I find Jekyll to be more flexible than Wordpress. Technically both can be used to make any kind of static site, but I find the customization friction to be lower with Jekyll.

4. I like the built-in version control I get with git/Github.

5. I like editing my site with an IDE where all files from content to style are intuitively accessible rather than navigating Wordpress' interface.

6. Github pages includes HTTPS and DDOS protection that I don't need to think about (or even know about). It's just built in.

7. It's in keeping with the open source spirit to have my personal site open source. Anyone can go in and look at what I'm doing, how I'm doing it, and even the history of how the site evolves. They could even fork it if they really wanted to for some reason.

Wordpress was never really the competition for you if those are your needs. Here's what wordpress does that most CMS's either don't do well, or cost money to do:

- Have a user friendly administration section that anyone can use regardless of technical expertise (by user friendly, I mean have WYSIWYG editor for all posts and make it extremely simple to manage content via a UI -- not CLI)

- Have roles for users with restrictable access

- Have a plugin ecosystem that allow just about any customization to be easy enough to implement that paying a freelancer to do so is quite affordable

- Have an entire theming eco-system that is very alive, with plenty of free or paid options to make a site look professional

I've been playing with Drupal for a bit and another thing WordPress does better is that you can update WordPress from inside WordPress dashboard, no need to understand anything.

I doubt we will ever see backend changes, like allowing postgresql database though.

Self-updating means that WordPress needs to be allowed to write to more places than just the "uploads" directory. Which is frightening, and a security risk.

Yes, but non-self-updating means tons and tons of sites run by lazy people end up sitting out there on ancient, known-compromised versions of WordPress forever, which is also a security risk (and arguably a bigger one).

Jekyll does have the last two as well:

Plugins: https://github.com/planetjekyll/awesome-jekyll-plugins

Themes: http://jekyllthemes.org/

But I do see your point.

Most people that need a blog or a CMS aren't a self-one-man-ruby-sql-sysop-devop-shop though.

Not the same market.

1. My host handles a lot of security issues on the backend. I just backup a .tar file with the latest revisions on site

2. I personally prefer using WYISYWG, especially when I add images and code snippets. Having to view a markdown renderer means I have to look at two things, unless your using a partial markdown renderer instead on input side (stackedit.io, inkdrop are some examples).

3. Installing plugins in wordpress is easy. The way I do most things is fork entire repos, test it out, and see if its worth learning. This is how I approach wordpress as well, try X plugins disable them all see which works best. With jekyll you have to do install plugins / libraries yourself, I just want to get straight to writing though

4. Wordpress is just bandaid solutions everywhere for me, I only git track changes I make from a base theme (its all just CSS)

5. Wordpress's interface is awful to look at when using the editor in admin panel. But you get used to it. I'm debating in writing a quick javascript extension / userscript that I can toggle to disable all the clutter while writing

6. Had issues with wordpress HTTPS issues that sitegrounds had to fix the otherday, I still have no idea why I didn't have my SSL certificate installed

7. As much as I like opensource, I do a lot of things closedsource.

Wordpress is great for me b/c I can customize it very quickly, do bandaid solution plugins and backups everywhere, and just focus on writing. I don't like reinventing the wheel or building my own tooling if I can avoid it.

Jekyll has always given me build errors in a windows OS environment since its based on ruby. What I had previously is using github-pages and deploying it live to see changes. Still learning netlify. Commits were extraordinarily messy for me actually, I would have 1000+ commits and 990 of them were just minor changes to draft posts. I could probably use seperate branches but out of the box, everything went to master branch

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