RIP Jekyll (The Genesis of the Jamstack)
bridgetownrb.com
bridgetownrb.com
I am autistic. I love coding.
A single person can create wonderful software that is a gift to everyone as open source.
I hate trying to be an extrovert and engage with a lot of people. I hate twitter and discord
Does that mean that I and people like me cannot do open source in 2021?
Most of these seem like detriments more than anything.
* Engagement on Twitter * Official Discord chat room * Public roadmap * Predictable release cycles * Welcoming community involvement in shaping new features and tackling technical debt * Cultivating working relationships with wider ecosystems (in this case Ruby, Jamstack, etc.)
> Lack of any one of these points isn’t the end of the world, but at the present moment, Jekyll lacks ALL of them. That’s a real problem.
Nobody cares if there's no Discord if you're releasing and responsive to Github issues / roadmap questions.
Without that, plenty of things are still “open source”, but users can’t really pick them up for their projects because they can’t rely on them. That’s fine: there’s plenty of really fascinating and meaningful projects out there that can’t be relied on for the long term. But for something like Jekyll, if I’m looking for a platform for my blog, I’d be remiss to pick something that’s stuck in the state it’s in.
That’s the issue that the author seems to be pushing at: he forked Jekyll because Jekyll is a widely adopted codebase that’s no longer able to support its niche, and he’s hoping that Bridgetown can fill that niche for users.
E.g. mobile requires a browser plugin (... which is a broken link, and there seem to be both few alternatives and they have reviews that imply there may be problems) or separate app to allow saving[1]. iOS requires a separate app[2]. Sync occurs in one giant html file, so if you edit one word, the whole thing has to be re-synced (so using it for any moderate amount of media is a no-go) (this is both a great feature for hosting-free purposes, and a great curse). Much of this has been due to browsers clamping down on permissions.
To work around those, your main option is to... use a web server to host it. If you do that, then tiddlywiki is basically just another self-hostable web server with an interesting UI - there are quite a few also-good competitors in that space.
[1]: https://tiddlywiki.com/static/GettingStarted%2520-%2520Andro... [2]: https://tiddlywiki.com/static/GettingStarted%2520-%2520iOS.h...
The whole concept of tiddlywiki (as a single mutable html file) has become extremely difficult to maintain, where it used to be extremely simple.
The rest of the stuff tiddlywiki does is still great - transclusion is a great idea, and it works well. Server hosting is extremely cheap and simple. The UI has some very one-or-few-users-friendly patterns, and it really does do non-linear quite well. There's a lot to like about it. But once you go to web hosting, you're competing with every other website - the ecosystem is quite literally like a million times larger than cross-OS-and-serverless, it's not surprising that it's not all that well known.
Well, I, for one, have built this ADHD resource with it: https://romankogan.net/adhd
Depends on where you ask around, I guess =]
You can weigh whether you want to do those things
Those things are often set up when people want to run software projects with certain goals and if those goals are not yours then that is fine, just know that there is a tradeoff.
One nice example is litestream[0]. It's open source, not open contribution -- similarly you can have open source without built in community/discord/project-management/etc.
[0]: https://github.com/benbjohnson/litestream#open-source-not-op...
That's a privilege not everyone can afford. I cannot do real-time communication, So I cannot tolerate discord but GitHub issues are fine but I guess the parent is not fine with that too and that's alright but the answer is 'yes' open-source projects are subject to digital social conformity like so many things.
'like so many things': Just like how a Twitter account with at least 5 digit follower count has become a mandatory for a solopreneur's SaaS product to survive especially more so if the said solopreneur doesn't have other prior networks.
> 'yes' open-source projects are subject to digital social conformity like so many things.
I whole-heartedly disagree. Maybe what's missing from the internet these days is the backbone to be clear about your own boundaries, but you absolutely do not owe anyone (who is not paying you) support or a place to file issues against your codebase that they don't also maintain.
You are not required to conform to anything you see on the internet (thankfully). This has more to do with your own motivations and goals. If you're making a F/OSS codebase to further your own ambition, then do whatever you think makes sense to get there and good luck.
If I stumble across some brilliant F/OSS work done by someone else for completely free and then released to me for completely free, I have already gained. They owe me nothing past that, and they never owed me anything to begin with.
> 'like so many things': Just like how a Twitter account with at least 5 digit follower count has become a mandatory for a solopreneur's SaaS product to survive especially more so if the said solopreneur doesn't have other prior networks.
Life for entrepreneurs is difficult and risk-laden, and that's why a lot of people don't become entrepreneurs. That fact does not mean the rest of the F/OSS world has to live like solopreneurs.
If you are making a product then it's your perogative to do what makes you successful (if that currently means trying build a "community" then so be it) -- that's your problem. If some person wants to just write software and make it open source so others can see it but doesn't want to maintain a community then that's their own perogative.
Every solo entrepreneur has to be their own marketing department. In the 2020s, marketing has to include social media.
The #1 job of an entrepreneur is not "build project", it is "persuade people with money to give you money". Forget that and you'll definitely fail.
Twitter may or may not be the right place for that (personally I think not, but it works for some people).
It means few people will hear about or discuss your projects, and that means you won't get the critical mass of people necessary for your project to become popular. If you also conflate popularity with usefulness or importance then that's a problem.
Pretty much all big open source projects have benefited from "marketing" of some sort or another. If you're unwilling to do that then you're limiting the scope and size of what you can accomplish to what you can do on your own.
However, devs who are happy to contribute to an existing project where others do the social stuff are always welcome on pretty much every open source effort. So of course you can do it.
Also like a business, you don’t try to do everything — you delegate against your weaknesses. You just need to convince one social person to contribute, and cover whatever social media nonsense is required.
Note that any project that scales in count eventually becomes primarily a human management and communication problem, irrespective of what’s being produced, or how. Either drop the goal of scaling up, or set your expectations accordingly (and delegate as needed).
Of course, sometimes doing nothing at all is all you need (a few users uses it successfully, and it spreads by word of mouth), but really this is just delegation by accident. Your users are taking the responsibility of communication onto themselves (and it will eventually fragment as different gossip ping groups get split-brained), and the project will eventually centralize communication or die under its own weight.
Absolutely not, but it does mean that you are likely to have difficulty if your aim is to build and support a project that is used by many, or otherwise be widely recognised.
If your goal is to play with cool stuff, put the results out there so others might see it and maybe use it or further build upon it, and won't be bothered if people don't, then you can definitely do that successfully without any of the community building & engagement noise listed.[‡]
If your goal is to contribute fixes and other help to other projects, then that too can be done without any of that noise. Unless one of those noisy channels is the only way to effectively communicate with the project you are contributing to, at that point some compromise may be needed on your part unless you prefer to move on and do something else instead. Moving on and doing something else instead, or branching and doing your own thing that way as long as you are OK with any licensing implications, is always an option.
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[‡] I'm not autistic, nor as completely introverted as I used to be, but my thoughts on this feel like they stem from a similar place to yours and this is how I will manage that if I ever get around to releasing some of the stuff I have bubbling under: I'll put it out there, if people want to use it then great, if they don't then fine too, if they want to mail me fine (I might even respond!), but I won't be putting it out there to build community or to serve one. It'll be my playground, and while I'd be happy for others to find it useful if I move on and stop maintaining it or don't have time to respond to correspondence I will feel no guilt. If people expect more of me than I am comfortable providing, then they can just go on expecting!
Didn’t jekyll prove the opposite?
It doesn't seem to right now, apparently.
It may have done previously but either that didn't last long-term or, more likely I suspect but haven't checked, things were different and there was much more community interaction until the current quiet period.
- the linked articles is about open source maintainers defining the relevancy and scope of their own projects, and telling critics / commentators (like Jared White in the OP) that their expectations of project maintainers (like Jekyll's) don't apply.
So I think that @gregors here is supporting @ThingBeat by basically saying "Open Source is Not About [Jared]" (i.e. that @ThinkBeat has the freedom to define the scope of their own open source work).
Correct?
Maintaining a public road map for example, that seems like boring busy work to me. If a project is truly dead anyone is free to fork or create a new project and spend their free time putting in the never-ending work.
"If you have expectations (of others) that aren't being met, those expectations are your own responsibility. You are responsible for your own needs. If you want things, make them."
That all being said: I think it's ok for OSS projects to "pass on" - and hopefully be replaced by better ones! I wish we had a better way of recognizing this for projects or talking about this industry-wide.
To my mind, Jekyll is feature-complete. The only changes I've needed to make to my Jekyll site are dealing with breakages from backwards-incompatible updates. I've been hosting with GitHub Pages for the past 12 years and I largely don't even have to think about it. It's nice.
I think there's probably two levels of discussion going on here. In very broad terms and with a generous scope of "we", we largely treat anything written in the last 15 years differently than anything that came before it. I don't know if it's because GitHub makes it so easy to see source or because recent languages have public repositories or something entirely different. But, no one looks at `bzip2` or `dig` and dismisses them as being obsolete because they don't have a hockey stick shape on the commit graph or because they don't serve multiple possible functions. To qrush's point, there has been a recent push to create "modern" implementations of system utilities and so we now have `ripgrep` and `bat` and maybe those new tools will reign supreme. But, I don't think that means `grep` or `cat` are dead and it's fantastic that they've worked reliably and consistently for so long (minus GNU vs BSD differences).
So my lament, if you will, is software being declared dead just because activity on it has slowed down (or essentially ceased). I think another way to interpret that data is it's mature and stable. I think it's great that Jekyll is a reasonably stable utility that I can rely upon. I can even install it via `apt` now and not have to deal with the mess of maintaining a Ruby environment. I can push a commit to GitHub and have a high degree of certainty that my site will generate the way I expect and that can match what I see on my own local system.
That level of maturity is something I'd like to see more software approach. In my experience, constantly chasing use cases often transforms a tool or library that was great at one thing into a tool that is okay at best at several things. Breaking compatibility is a good way to start annoying your supporters.
Maybe Jekyll won't be adopted for greenfield projects and that'll lead to its obsolescence. I just think that's a premature proclamation. It has a massive installation base via GitHub Pages, so stability is likely the better lever to pull.
Personally I found Jekyll plugins lacking and those that were good seemed pretty old/unmaintained.
However I only moved to Hugo from Jekyll just because I didn't want to deal with Ruby gem installation and dependency management. I am not a Ruby dev by any means, I have enough dependency management misery from being a Python dev.
Hugo installation is just a brew-installed or Go-installed CLI tool I never have to think about dependencies of, thanks to how great the Golang packaging/distribution situation is.
And I recently rebuilt one of my Hugo sites the other day and got a notice about some function that is now deprecated and will break something soon. That’ll make the third time something like this has occurred with hugo in the last few years. Dun like it.
I do use some simple plugins for things like Redirects and Sitemaps.
But for many sites we build, what Jekyll does right now is just fine.
It also works with CloudCannon. Who are expanding their supported SSGs.
So if we shift our business, we'll likely just follow what ever SSG is blessed by them! :-)
Have been using Jekyll for years for all manner of sites and the most beautiful feature is that I’ve barely changed anything.
Even when I did recently update a few sites to new versions (mainly just because I was making some changes and figured why not) nothing broke.
> Engagement on Twitter
> Official Discord chat room
Cherry picked from a list with 4 others elements that I agree with, but the first two are terrible. Twitter is getting more and more closed (you can't see some stuff without being logged in now) and for Discord you have to create an account to see the content. Both are not free software. Reading stuff around free software shouldn't require an account on a proprietary platform.
But that has not been my experience with Matrix.
The best part about these, is that though we step off topic sometimes, generally everyone is really helpful and focused on the general subject matter. It's not endless gossip, in jokes and memes, these people actively find new faces, and then find places for them to fit in the community and things to take ownership of.
These smaller networks are a rare type of community, and I love it.
Humour aside, you would do it if you wanted to encourage movement of the closed silos. It's not likely that your irl friends and family will make the jump anytime soon, but getting dev communities to make the switch is a much more tractable problem.
The biggest projects are typically on IRC, mailing lists, and online forums. Linux, ffmpeg, practically every Linux or BSD distro, Git, nginx, postgresql, systemd, neovim, Freedesktop, etc.
Practically none of the software I use on a daily basis has a significant Discord presence.
>neovim
Neovim is on twitter, and doesn't have a mailing list. They also offer matrix and IRC (presumably bridged). See https://neovim.io/community/
Github is not open. All the things listed there are costly, in one way or another. There's nothing free about anything that makes up open source today. Open source became corporate some time in the late 00s. And while I don't agree with the author (including the fact that he calls the new product Ruby-powered, not Impaired by Ruby), I do agree with that strange assessment that open source communities work that way.
> Official Discord chat room
No. Not at all. Many very popular OSS projects don't use Twitter or Discord. Any time you say "all OSS projects use technology X", be it GitHub or Twitter or whatever, the only thing you can be sure of is that the statement is wrong. Some projects may, sure, but that's different.
Probably the only "technology" you can say they generally use is a web page.
It is reasonable to say "they have 1 or more ways to interact, and that's clearly identified on their web page". But assuming that everyone uses the same communication mechanism is demonstrably false.
> Lack of any one of these points isn’t the end of the world, but at the present moment, Jekyll lacks ALL of them. That’s a real problem.
I think the point is that most projects will engage with the public in at least some of these ways.
They come from people who want to make money more than they want to build a nice thing and share it. Gotta spread that Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt to usurp Jekyll's userbase.
Even by that (misleading) metric, it doesn't seem to be dead. Expecting maintainers to tilt at the newest windmill instead of actually maintain is a critical part of why so many in the open source community burn out.
It would be extremely souring to me if Jekyll decided to add webpack and other javascript dependencies with a newer version. One of the things I like about Jekyll is that it's a STATIC site generator that doesn't try to do everything.
Some sites I want to be dead simple, and that's what you get with Jekyll. If I want more complexity I'd go with a more complex generator like Hugo or Gatsby.
That's my impression as well, as an outsider.
A recurring nightmare of mine as a maintainer is that I'll wake up one day and read someone's blog proclaiming the death of one of my projects, when all I've done is stopped adding new features to it. Especially so when it's someone who's made a living for themselves as a downstream user.
And I'm in the same boat as you: I've had a Jekyll-based blog, without incident, for a little bit under a decade now. It's only gotten faster and easier to use over time, which is more than I even asked for.
Changes are very rare other than occasional bug fixes or breaking ecosystem changes, but that doesn't mean the code is bad.
The code is a hammer, you don't need the newest shiniest hammer. You just need the hammer that hits nails.
If I want an SSG, I want an engine that takes a relatively simplistic text markup format, like Markdown or Org, and create a series of HTML documents from it. Why would the technology that does the gruntwork matter to me as an user?
Also, with Jekyll's plugin structure, what is an example of a functionality that cannot be achieved in Jekyll, but can in another non-Ruby SSG?
Sounds like a "Hotel California" repo now, if you follow me. Which is unacceptable for a lot of distributors/users (are they just going to package random git HEAD snapshots whenever they feel like it, now that releases are apparently de facto banned?).
Deviations from their previous release schedule are certainly noteworthy, but release schedules also naturally length as projects mature.
And then there's the Theseus-type questions: if Jekyll changes its name because the current maintainers have lost access to the RubyGems credentials, is it really not Jekyll anymore? It occurs to me that OSS is replete with `${project}-ng` namings, the `ng` suffix typically indicating that the project serves the same purpose as its original form but has been moved to a different namespace for whatever reason. If Jekyll's current maintainers were to publish `jekyll-ng` on RubyGems, I'd be inclined to call that a continuation of the original Jekyll for all extents and purposes.
At this rate, if the release maintainer continues to ghost the project (including by refusing to make any clear public announcement), Jekyll users are going to have to fork. You can't wait forever.
> but release schedules also naturally length as projects mature.
That's why I pointed out they had been maintaining a very steady monthly release schedule for years beforehand (and just look at the total release count!). Plus, "maybe they don't need to do a release" is rather contradictory with "this project is in rude health, look at how many patches they're receiving piled up in the (unreleased) HEAD!"...
This is a point of confusion, since GitHub now has a few different things that could be called "releases": tags (a Git thing), tags that are labeled as "releases" (a GitHub thing), and released packages via one of GitHub's package indexes (including one that behaves like RubyGems).
Anybody who has push access to a repository should also have access to the first two, and probably has access to the third. The first is a Git-level consequence of access, and the second is just sugar on top of tags ("releases" don't behave any meaningfully different, and many projects do releases without using the release labeling). IOW, they should have sufficient permissions, as-is, to continue cutting releases. They might not have sufficient permissions to publish those releases to RubyGems, but that just means renaming the package to `jekyll-ng` or using GitHub's index instead.
> Plus, "maybe they don't need to do a release" is rather contradictory with "this project is in rude health, look at how many patches they're receiving piled up in the (unreleased) HEAD!
Yeah, these facts are in tension. Then again, looking further, a lot of the recent activity has been documentation and dependency tweaks, along with some light backporting activity (since they're also continuing to support Jekyll 3). So I think the needle I'd thread here is: "the project is receiving active attention, but is sufficiently stable to not warrant regular releases."
It's kind of interesting to me that the author opted not to use the Github "fork" feature to start Bridgetown, and there's no reference to Jekyll in the README (and hardly any in the git history either). This strikes me as an odd way to respond if the concerns are for the health of the upstream project; it would make sense to reach out and try to work with upstream if they aren't doing what needs to be done, then explain why a fork is needed in the README.
Jekyll itself is a project that still receives active commits and continues to do everything I ask of it (and indeed, it seemed essentially feature complete for my uses years ago).
It's literally at the top of the article.
I don't doubt Jekyll is mature, but there's a difference between mature and abandoned. It looks like at least two different folks are committing, which gives me hope that this project (which we use quite heavily at $DAYJOB) is mature.
Meanwhile "the Jamstack" seems to be the exact opposite of that, a privacy nightmare all about gluing together micro-APIs that I have to keep paying for forever. I could wake up one day and find that my """static""" site is suddenly missing all its images because Cloudinary is having an outage or whatever. Why would I want to subject my readers to this, much less myself?
Sometimes it's ok for software to be "done".
The latest version of GNU sed is almost two years old. Does that mean it's time to ditch it for the latest rewritten-in-Rust tool du jour? Of course not.
Infrastructural software such as Jekyll should be finishable.
Here's an example: https://github.com/eatonphil/notes.eatonphil.com/blob/master.... It's longer than usual since it embeds parts of the home page html inside it.
These scripts last for years and only change slightly over time. Very low maintenance.
Writing a small static site generator for a personal site can be done in an afternoon, and it's fun.
You build a Rules file with steps for each of your file types and it loops through and builds your site. It comes with Markdown out of the box but you can make it do just about anything.
https://github.com/ivanstojic/pandoc-ssg/blob/master/Makefil...
The markdown library I use has not changed its API in over 3 years at least.
The only reason this script is more than two lines of markdown-related code is because I wanted to store headers for other things.
This script is the most complex of my SSGs because I write on this blog the most. But even then it's only 200 LoC which is still (to me) surprisingly small.
Other of my SSGs are even simpler and have no markdown renderer: just jinja and file walking code.
So I'm not really sure which part of <200 LoC and no upstream changes you consider a hassle.
I switched to Zola for most of my stuff a while back, and while there are still gaps, it does everything I need and is production ready.
Well, one program to generate the site, and then an implicit assumption that you'll use another program (your Web browser) at some point to verify the output.
If you're into cutting out prereqs when you can, why not cut out one more?
That is my point.
If it is a given that Runtime A is going to be involved, and your angle is to tout the benefit of binary B being to let you to eliminate Runtime C, why even settle for now needing to rely on B? Why wouldn't you try to avoid it as well? Just use A.
> If you're into cutting out prereqs when you can, why not cut out one more?
You can't cut out the browser, so the only thing left was that single binary you first replied to.
That's a correct reading of my comment. To take that to mean, though, that you should start "writing HTML directly" is a logical leap—and one that happens to turn out to be wrong; it's not something I wrote, and it's not even something I implied. It's an incorrect reading of my comment.
> I would assume it's the reading everyone made
Even after what just happened, you're still making assumptions?
> We all read in good faith
That's disputable. Actual observed behavior on HN lately seems to trend towards the easiest/shortest path to dismissal, or: How can I reaffirm that someone I want to disagree with is dumber than I am?, again à la Twitter.
> phrase it in a way that's less ambiguous
Okay, I'll bite. How should it have been phrased? By the time you had written the comment prior to your most recent one, I had already posted two other comments that were pretty damn specific, one of them excruciatingly so:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28524423>
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28518839>
What you're demanding is to spend an inordinate amount of effort seemingly to optimize for folks who are some combination of (a) subject to guardrails on their thoughts but silent about it, (b) themselves unwilling to put two seconds' consideration into an idea posted on a site explicitly meant for curious discussion, and/or (c) possibly deliberately uncharitable/hostile. <https://pchiusano.github.io/2014-10-11/defensive-writing.htm...>
Are you suggesting that we use an extension/addon for Firefox or Chrome for generating ones site from .md over the thread-starting rust binary? If so, for what reason?
In the second comment you suggest "listing transformations" "and then have a machine perform those steps". We must have different views on "damn specific".
I'm not demanding anything. You posted something that was immediately downvoted, and asked why, and I spent time outlining a possible explanation. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm not, but another perspective rarely hurts.
You do you, we all strive to be understood.
No. A download-this-extension step wouldn't be much different than a download-this-single-binary step. I am specifically talking about eliminating inessential bits and bobs from the pipeline.
> We must have different views on "damn specific".
Respond to the message in context. Even if you still fail to understand them, are you arguing that those messages are ambiguous enough to allow for the interpretation that I could have been talking about completely abandoning the use of a static site generator and "writing HTML directly", as you were originally saying?
Ignoring that issue, I don't know what's unclear about dedicating a page example.com/colophon to work as a substitute for your static site generator binary. When you want to update example.com, you visit its /colophon, you let it ingest the directory containing your markdown sources and templates and other assets for processing—same as with any static site generator—and the result is a a bunch of post-processed files comprising your site's static resources—again: same as any other static site generator produces.
If I had to bet a month of warm showers on it, I'd go with my suspicion that guard rails on your thoughts are the source of confusion here, and not that I failed in any identifiable way to state exactly what I'm talking about.
Ok, let's get down to brass tacks.
The post you originally responded to was:
> Oh interesting, that's a Rust-based SSG. Definitely something nice about a single binary and not needing a full language runtime installed.
That's someone stating that it's nice not needing anything outside of a rust binary, some reading, and of course, as you state, a browser for reading the resulting site.
You then responded with, verbatim:
> Well, one program to generate the site, and then an implicit assumption that you'll use another program (your Web browser) at some point to verify the output.
> If you're into cutting out prereqs when you can, why not cut out one more?
You are suggesting cutting out one more. For all the text you have written, you have not really stated which of those to cut out, and what to replace it with. Is there a product or project you can recommend?
> If I had to bet a month of warm showers on it, I'd go with my suspicion that guard rails on your thoughts are the source of confusion here, and not that I failed in any identifiable way to state exactly what I'm talking about.
You can either blame everyone else for not getting you, or imagine a scenario where your thoughts to you make complete sense, but when translating that to writing, some steps are ignored and you're being downvoted because the suggestions either doesn't contribute anything (as it's written, which is the correct reason to downvote something), or sounds dismissive/rude to the comment you were replying to (equally likely reason why you were getting downvoted).
You're arguing with me to change something about my interpretation, despite me having spent likely 10 times more effort on it than any other person on here did with your comment.
But hey, I might be wrong, maybe I'm too stupid to get it. I have no power over how you communicate. I have tried making myself very clear many times over, and I assume you have too. But obviously we're not understanding eachother.
Good luck in all your future endeavours. You win whatever it is you wanted to win.
Neither one of these claims are true. You're again ignoring the context on record.
You yourself stated, "You can't cut out the browser, so the only thing left was that single binary you first replied to", and the general tone is implying that being this explicit for something so obvious is superfluous (and I'd agree). Even so, there's my reply in the affirmative. So the combo of so-obvious-it-doesn't-need-to-be-stated + having it stated anyway is working against you here on the claim that I never clearly described which to cut out.
As for the second part, I assert that putting up a /colophon page that can function "as a substitute for your static site generator binary" similar to the hypothetical README.html that I mention in comment 28407936 <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28407936> in fact _very_ straightforwardly addresses the "what to replace it with" issue.
> Is there a product or project you can recommend?
That's a subtle change in criteria. Many people are not content to use anything except a homegrown static site generator, and my original reply was only supposed to refer to the concept of using the runtime that you already get for free in your browser to cut out the need for either a separate runtime ("full language" runtime, in their words) or a separate binary that needs to be installed and maintained out-of-band. It was not supposed to be a recommendation of a specific project, nor does the context demand it.
> sounds dismissive/rude to the comment you were replying to (equally likely reason why you were getting downvoted)
That's a new claim original to this comment only—again, changing context—and in any case is another bad reading.
> But hey, I might be wrong, maybe I'm too stupid to get it
I don't think you're too stupid to get it; I think you're just committed to not understanding, or that you're possibly feigning a lack of understanding well past the point where you really do understand, e.g. because your real commitment is to the issue of whether I have communicated clearly—and a sudden realization on your part (esp. of something that _was_, on a second reading, adequately conveyed but earlier missed) would conflict with that commitment.
No, I truly still don't understand what you were or are suggesting.
Have you moved the generation software from your machine to serverside behind the colophon page, making it no longer static?
If you don't want what you apparently consider an uncharitable interpretation the easiest way is to provide more room for another.
Please ask someone in your life to read this exchange and give an outside perspective on it. It might be eye opening. Or you'll have confirmation that I'm just winding you up, or whatever it is I'm doing.
What? No. Geez. The /colophon page itself, as stated, already contains the "transformations that need to be applied to produce the desired output".
Aside from that page, there is nothing except the runtime baked in to the browser that you are already using. That content lives as a file inside the source repo of the site you're trying to publish—and y'know what, even though I suggested making it accessible from /colophon in the final product, in fact, that doesn't even matter! You could have it be called README.html in the source repo for all it matters, just like I already mentioned.
There is no need for a separately installed "full language runtime". There is no separate binary instead, whether self-contained or not. There is no separate browser extension. There is no separate haha-here's-an-application-server-so-it's-not-actually-a-static-site-after-all. There is no need for any of those things. Why do you continue throwing even more of these types of questions my way when every previous one has already been struck down by an answer in the negative (and a "yes" to any of them would contradict the very premise)? I strongly suggest you go through your exercise of having someone else read through this, because this is exasperatingly repetitive in a way that is not my fault.
From <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24495646>:
> [There is] a "packager" for putting together add-ons. It uses "node.js". All it really does is apply "zip" to some files. I tried to install the "packager" on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. It had several hundred dependencies, and wouldn't run because of some version dependency in node.js for something totally irrelevant to the task at hand
From <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28518839>:
> If folks were really committed to improving the developer experience, [...] development would work like this: ¶1. Download the project source tree ¶2. Open README.html ¶3. Drag and drop the project source onto README.html
See also: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28407936>
Please, Jared, contribute to Jekyll instead. There are many contributors, and you will probably get better code reviews. Bridgetown is your one-person show where you contribute the most commits (https://github.com/bridgetownrb/bridgetown/graphs/contributo...). Who is reviewing your changes? :)
YOU can revive Jekyll :)! I would like that. No offence, but Bridgetown is probably on "hiatus" sooner or later as well. I, as a user, have no trust in these forks.
https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/issues/8085
This was before I had the slightest inkling of ever attempting anything like a fork. :)
And I'm truly thankful for all the people who are placing their trust in the long-term health of Bridgetown as warranted by the extremely active and robust 16-month commit and release history so far.
I spent a few months making the "ultimate" Gatsby site for my blog. I loved it. A year went by and I had no desire to relearn everything in order to update the thing (and fix the myriad of security vulns GitHub was now warning me about).
You don't want bitrot to introduce vulnerabilities through unmaintained publicly exposed things in your stack.
GH pages is includes jekyll. It's a feature of their product. I would expect them to maintain that as long as jekyll is part of their feature suite.
I'm only bringing them up because it impacts their product directly.
https://docs.github.com/en/pages/setting-up-a-github-pages-s...
Not very classy.
This reminds me to be thankful for every day I get.
I don't see why Jekyll Core would need an urgent release.
A few years later and I ended up deleting most of it and replacing the internals with Rails. Now Sitepress is just a tiny rails application sitting on top of a bunch of files. Most of the maintenance and dependencies are handled by major Rails lib maintainers. If you’ve grown use to Rails helpers, they’re all there.
When you deploy it, you can compile it into static files and deploy as you’d expect, but you can also deploy it as a rails or rack app … or even embed it into an existing rails app.
When Rails 7.0 gets released I’ll drop JS importmaps into the default install for free and have my dream static site generator that doesn’t have a huge asset compilation step.
Nextjs and Gatsby are good candidates here and most likely will plug into Github's existing asset framework.
What is this "dead" nonsense? It isn't a story, it's a tool, and it's complete. By that logic my framing hammer is "dead" now, too.
"No more updates" isn't always a bad thing.
As for the "dead" nonsense and where that's actually coming from, did you read the article? :)
Nope. Nope, nope, nope. Neither C nor Jekyll are dead.
There’s been a fair amount of internet consternation since I published this article. While I do stand by everything in the post factually-speaking, I apologize for the insensitive timing of this article—coming so soon after Frank’s passing. I’m genuinely sorry this came across as a “Jared vs. Frank” debacle. Should I have waited a few more weeks or months? Probably. Perhaps it was originally a mistake for me to refrain from publicly commenting on the statements regarding Jekyll’s “permanent hiatus” back in May. It’s hard to say. At the very least, I hope we can all agree that Jekyll’s legacy as the “first among many” of modern static site generators is meaningful to a lot of people, even if we sometimes disagree on the best way to honor that legacy and push Ruby on the Jamstack forward. If the one thing that comes out of all this is that more people step forward to share their positive experiences with Jekyll, Ruby, and building websites, that’s a good thing.
The main downside is that the Hugo documentation is sometimes terse and snarky.
Compared to really sluggish build times with Jekyll/Ruby it was incredible!
Some sites went from 10s of seconds to what felt like instant build!
However, with new versions of Ruby and M1 Macs, I dont notice build lag in Jekyll anymore!
And overall, I much preferred Jekyll and the way it structured sites, template and includes! :-)
I'm doing a non trivial project with eleventy in my free time -- works well.
It can be seen here:
* Hugo
* Eleventy
* Zola
Note that I excluded ones that output SPAs since I just want plain old hand-written HTML.
Jekyll’s biggest hurdle for me was installing a Ruby environment.
Based only on what I've heard, but my understanding is it's not a huge undertaking to port over