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Comment by quickthrower2 | Hacker News Reader

I almost always use Wordpress for Blogs and sites in general.

Reasons:

If I leave it for 10 years and come back I will know how to maintain it. The tools will exist (especially if WordPress auto upgrades).

If I use some static site gen, I will need to remember all the syntax, use some docker container to run the version I used all that time ago. Even coming back to it after a year can leave me with confusion.

Also WordPress has a brilliant ecosystem of plugins and themes. And if you are worried about security, there are plugins that will pump it out into a static site on S3, if you like, so you can use WordPress to author, and S3 to host.

The WordPress ecosystem can rival most no-code tools too.

Also hosting is ubiquitous, and cheap, and usually simple (open CPanel, hit install new Wordpress Blog).

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I had this “recall” issue with configuration tools (Salt) that I used a couple times a year. I wrote a README, to resolve the issue.

Why would you need to use docker for a SSG?

For example, could you today run a ruby based SSG from 10 years ago? Let's pretend there is a bit of custom code and time invested in it.

I guess you could install a bunch of old versions on Ruby, gems, etc. on your machine too, but docker, or a VM might be easier.

Or you could go through, remember how all the code works and upgrade it to the latest versions of everything to run it. Assuming the SSG du jour 2013 is still maintained :-).

I tried to resurrect a 2 year old NodeJS project and gave up trying to upgrade it to the latest versions, NodeJS people really love their major version changes, and breaking back compat for no real reason.

You don't need docker for that. Also if you leave a WordPress for years with auto-updates, the plugins will often be abandoned causing your site to be vulnerable.Not to mention any breaking changes that can be introduced.

A SSG generated site will be the same in 10 years as its today, even if you might need to fix some things with your project to make further updates.

You basically just said wordpress will bitrot but SSG tools are immune.

He appears to me to have said they bitrot in different ways. Which way is preferable is a matter of priorities.

Reading it again I think his point is that the generated HTML is good enough to spring further work even if you lose the original tool. I can agree with that.

With wordpress you could export it to HTML as a backup but it is an extra step.

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