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Comment by mrkentutbabi | Hacker News Reader

What about between 2 boring technologies?

For example I’m debating between Eleventy and Hugo (because I know both JS and Go, but not Ruby so I will skip Jekyll)

Before you spend much time on a pure (thus limited) SSG, I recommend taking a close look at https://Remix.run. Remix supports a superset of Eleventy or Hugo (or Jekyll or even NextJS export). It's too new to be considered "boring", but it leverages OG web standards and defaults to web platform-native foundations. Given its provenance and the authors' bona fides, I'm betting heavy it sticks around for the long haul. I'm unaffiliated w the project, but I've been doing web-related things for a living since 1998, and for me Remix is a breath of fresh air and the successor to NextJS as my framework of choice.

> Given its provenance and the authors' bona fides, I'm betting heavy it sticks around for the long haul.

That's what people said for Redwood.js. One year later and it's mostly forgotten.

So? "People" may have said all kinds of things about Redwood or the price of rice in China. I never promoted Redwood, and (to engage with your off-base "rejoinder") objectively speaking, it didn't offer any advantages over NextJS. Remix, on the other hand, is fundamentally different from any other framework.

The fact you worry about what language they're written in - while you shouldn't need to ever edit any of their code - already implies they're not boring and you're overthinking the decision already.

Pick the one that gets you up and running the fastest, ideally one that doesn't rely on you installing additional runtimes.

In principle you’re absolutely right, but Hugo actually comes with lots of strings attached due to their choice of Go, like having to use Go templates for example - which can be weird if you don’t have a Go background. The more elaborate constructs you’re trying to build, the more you need to research how the Hugo Go runtime works to sort out quirks.

Flip a coin, try the first one out, and if anything pops up in a few days that makes you think the other might be more suitable, evaluate the other one.

I recently started experimenting with Snowpack for JS build. I realized it doesn’t do sourcemaps very will so I grabbed Parcel. That worked great but doesn’t have a testing story and Vite has a couple options there. Vite has been good.

It was work to evaluate each of those and switch between them. But not that much work really since I hadn’t committed a huge codebase yet. But it was worth it because now I know why you might choose one over the other.

Granted the “boring” choice would be Webpack.

This a good advice for dealing with 'decision paralysis' which can make you waste more time than just trying out the options.

I do this. But 1d20 / options. Crit fail means ignore for a week otherwise divide up the space evenly and extra slots mean re-roll. Having the option to punt is useful.

Good advice thanks

Compare them in your particular scenario. Only you know what is important to you. If choosing for a company, ask the people who will have to work with it.

Maybe one has more responsive developers, or a more helpful community.

Boring is on a scale, and you need a reference to assess the level of boringness. Eleventy, Hugo and Jekyll are all a little to non-boring compared to ssg6 or just throwing txt files in www-root.

The truly boring choice for your blog is PHP and/or Perl. Wordpress, Movable Type, or possibly Textpattern if you are feeling a little edgy.

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