Comment by cxr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cxr | Hacker News Reader

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Today's static site generators are simply not fit for mass consumption. Even Jekyll—among the most polished and popular—immediately presents anyone stumbling onto its landing page with a facsimile of a terminal window with 3 inscrutable commands. And the kicker is that even if a prospective "customer" who was previously unacquainted with the command line managed to find their system's terminal emulator to open it up and enter the first command, it will almost certainly fail! What the jekyllrb.com folks gloss over is that there's an "implicit step zero"[1], and if you selected a random, college-educated writer, artist, etc, from a crowd, they are simply on average not actually in the audience for Jekyll or any other contemporary static site generator, despite how slick jekyllrb.com might look (and despite what delusions the "just learn how GitHub Pages works" crowd may hold).

1. https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/03/06/how-to-displace-java...

Despite how toxic it is, Twitter is very simple: get account, follow a few people, and you get a text field where you can write stuff, hit "Publish", and you can reach your audience. Even a senile old man who wonders if injecting disinfectant might be worthwhile can use it.

Forcing people to register a domain and choose a template is "too much work" compared to that.

This describes my experience with Hugo. I ran into not only an implicit zero step, but many other intermediate steps that were not explicit in the documentation. My decision for Hugo was influenced by the clear "getting started" type of instructions on their website. I got a bit frustrated in the end, so rolled back to WordPress.

Thanks for relating this story. It's good to be able to point to comments that serve as concrete examples.

One of the things I mentioned in that post is folks' tunnel vision—in these cases, tunnel vision on the parts of the people associated with the project who are unable to see the actual number of hurdles that an outsider will encounter. The post on the Light Table blog[1] that I referenced lays this out, too. Its title "Pain We Forgot" is almost self-explanatory.

1. http://lighttable.com/2014/05/16/pain-we-forgot/

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