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Comment by akho | Hacker News Reader

I do not understand the point in these static site generators.

To me, the attractiveness of having a static website is that you get to choose the presentation appropriate to the particular content of each page. You can also automate some of the work in making those pages — generate a particular folder or preprocess some of the htmls — but static site generators seem to insist on running the whole thing.

If you are happy with a blog + a couple of similarly-formatted static pages, why not Wordpress?

Also: ‘minimalist’ generator with its own made-up markup format.

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I used to run 5 wordpress sites on shared hosting. For a number of reasons I decided to move to a vps. It had basic resources but nothing special as I wasn't doing anything special. They were all very low traffic sites. But even with that, mariadb kept crashing due to running out of ram. As I was investigating what was going on I also started to realize the huge amount of traffic aimed at my sites just trying to compromise them. I took some steps to secure them but I still kept having issues.

I've transitioned all but one to static sites. Wordpress really didn't bring anything I needed that I don't get with Hugo. With my static sites I don't come close to the resource issues I had. Things are much more secure, there's nothing to "hack". My workflow is simple and I really like it. I edit my posts locally in Atom. I push changes to my git repository and then build the site and use rsync to push those changes to the host. It works great.

So that's the point for me. Much more resource efficient, more secure, gives me what I need without losing anything.

Another option I haven't used but I think could make sense in some situations is using wordpress as a static site generator.

MovableType, from what I remember, defaults to generating static pages. It’s proprietary these days, though. wget -r on a wordpress site probably takes a bit too long? I don’t know.

Anyway, the task solved by static generators is trivial, so we get a trillion non-supported github repos all building the same kind of site (basically a Wordpress site), badly. Moving from one to another without breaking links is hard. Wordpress at least will not go away at a random moment.

Because it is safer. With Wordpress and other execution environments your attack vectors will increase.

Why would I use Wordpress if all I need are some static sites and maybe a form?

I would rather use a form handler that processes data that comes from the form and let the other sites be what they are: static sites. So my question in this case is: Why Wordpress?

For me less is more sometimes and I can sleep better when I don't need to watch WP and it's plugins to be updated before the next malicious actor decides to attack half of the internet with an PHP exploit. Of course there is auto-updates for WP itself nowadays but the basic problem is still the same. You use a dynamic programming language though you probably don't need one.

I am also not an advocate of custom markup because I think we already have more than enough flavors now.

That is an argument for static sites — which I fully agree with. I do not understand this particular pre-packaged approach. These things are trivial to build in a site-specific way, and you do not need to sacrifice quite as much flexibility to do it.

There are lots of users with advanced IT skills but still no programming experience, they now have one more tool to choose from....

I think "pre-packaged" approaches like this (or hugo, gatsby etc.) try to solve a very specific purpose.

As I see it from a quick glance this one is for people who want to publish math/science work and therefor it supports rendering LaTex.

I read about people building shops with SSG's and I myself use hugo for many tasks.

Sure I could still do it manually but I prefer writing content in markdown and SSG's like hugo because I am way faster and don't tend to forget something. When I build the site then everything is included and I am ready to deploy.

SSG's work with neat little plugins to ease your work with SEO, links and whatnot and while I didn't understand this in the first place I sure did when I finished my first project with hugo.

Just give it a shot and tell us why you still don't need an SSG but rather stick to coding everything yourself.

I will never look back and I enjoy working with SSG's.

Looking back on my own experience, the first step is always "I'll write my own static HTML because why run a full service?" But then you want to put a list of pages or something in, so you need some kind of preprocessing. So you try to write a program to do that. But if you don't have something like XSLT, Rascal, or XTran in your toolbox, the straightforward path seems to be to have your own representation that's easy to parse in your general purpose language of choice and then emit HTML.

Easy to maintain secure cite.

When you have OpenBSD with content in read only mounted disk, that's a solid setup.

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