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Comment by helium | Hacker News Reader

Look, this is cool and all from a technical perspective, but why are people strapping themselves in static site generator straightjackets like this? At some point, doesn't it become much simpler to just use a server side framework?

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They're significantly faster, they never break, and they're way more secure.

Pretty much everyone already agrees they're less flexible.

My personal site is simple enough that there aren't any database-requiring features I actually want on it, and benefits of Jekyll include:

  - Just feels nice. I actually enjoy playing with it.
  - Cheap, I have it on AWS CF (a CDN) and it costs $0.10/month for
  a few thousand pageviews
  - Fast, with such few page views even wordpress would be fast enough
  for me, but I like that it's REALLY fast

The price benefit isn't really a consideration for me, I still have the server I used to run it on (in fact I don't have a unix machine at home, so I edit the site on my server), but it is nice that it can be hosted on a really good CDN (which a database-driven website couldn't be.)

I use Armin Ronacher's rstblog site generator. I'd say the inverse of what you said is true, at least in my experience. At some point it is much simpler to just use a static site generator. That point is when you nail down your workflow. I wrote about this very topic this morning:

http://mattdeboard.net/2011/05/09/more-tips-on-rstblog/

It's cheaper, there's no app server to crash, the best code is no code, etc.

Static sites can easily cope with a massive spike in traffic caused by things like being posted to Hacker News.

Frameworks like Jekyll are a good choice if you want to use github pages.

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