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Comment by dmje | Hacker News Reader

Again, because I'm boring like that: it's pretty hilarious to me that anyone would choose to make a new blog and not just use WordPress, especially when their stated aim contains this: "...that makes it as easy as possible to create posts".

There are some moments when you shouldn't use WordPress. A blog is not one of those moments.

Avoiding the obvious tool for the job is classic developer trendytool syndrome.

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Not really, wordpress is a bit of nightmare to code upon and buying plugins and themes can result in incompatibility issues and vulnerabilities. I think Medium is easier, but it’s a walled platform.

Substack seems increasingly popular, though not among devs for some reason.

Keep in mind that recently Substack said that they allow Nazis and wouldn't remove them

Sorry to be argumentative, but it just isn't. It's PHP, and you probably don't need to code anything at all. You also don't need many plugins. Incompatibility issues and vulnerabilities just aren't a thing - as long as you keep stuff up to date and don't install a thousand dodgy plugins, you'll be fine.

And yes, this is what I do: maintaining 50+ sites for clients, so I have been round the block a few times, not just making this up.

"This is what I do and I am fine with all the trade-offs so doing it any other way is wrong and a waste of time" - classic developer do-as-i-say-ism.

It’s funny, I see it as entirely the other way round.

I see many on HN as being sort of “automatically negative” about Wordpress and php and unable to see that there are actually some times when they’re totally the right tools for the job.

I’d be the last person to suggest anyone use Wordpress for everything - yes, I happen to have a niche that is about this tool, and I like it and am passionate about it, and for what we do it’s highly relevant and very much the right tool - but we’re also very pragmatic about decision making.

What I see so much in developer land is that certain trends drive strategy. It’s so often not the boring, known, stayed tool which wins the day but the bleeding edge one which actually isn’t as good a fit.

As I say in a comment lower down here - the tradeoffs to me here are: no feed, no comments, no categories, no OG tags, no API - all of which are out of the box with Wordpress.

Ah, please tell me the easy way to include interactive js demos in wordpress like the blog post author has. It's obvious that the blogpost author wants a level of customization that wordpress can't offer.

Also, trying new technologies was literally a goal of the project.

I mean, write a simple plugin that enables you to embed these using a shortcode, if there isn't an existing plugin that does it already?

WordPress is insanely customisable - it's "just php". And sure, maybe his new skill learning could be coding on WordPress :-)

> I mean, write a simple plugin that enables you to embed these using a shortcode

Ok, so learn php when they could just use js which they likely already know and likely get paid to know.

Wordpress and php are negative value skills, you do not want to advertise that you know those things as a developer because someone might try to hire you for them.

Failing to understand what "Wordpress and php are negative value skills" even means. I'm pretty happy with the work I get paid for ;-)

It means I, for example, wish I didn't know how to use WP and PHP so I didn't have to work on them in our legacy apps. Because I don't want to write or read PHP. I'm much happier when I don't have to. Get paid the same either way.

> Wordpress and php are negative value skills, you do not want to advertise that you know those things as a developer because someone might try to hire you for them.

This was unnecessary.

It's the truth, the jobs that use php are not the ones I want to work in. People are saying php is actually good nowadays but I have no reason or desire to learn it. I don't want to learn or work with wordpress, I already know as many scripting languages as I need to know, and there are no companies I want to work for that use php.

I'm already in the part of my career where learning another programming language is not what will take me to the next level so unless there is something unique about a programming language that makes it very useful I'm not interested in learning it.

Learning how to use more tools is not necessarily better when you are already proficient in other more flexible tools.

Your personal view is not widespread though, your original message would have been better left off with out bashing PHP because YOU don't find a use for it.

There's billions of dollars in revenue generated yearly from PHP sites. And not just "legacy" either, I'm talking evergreen PHP apps being built and generating revenue.

It's just as alive and well if not even more alive than some other languages people prefer over it.

You've been hilariously accurate here—I was actually a WordPress dev for years, and now I don't mention it because I'm not interested in those jobs. Haven't even told any of my colleagues!

I'm not sure I'd want to prioritize PHP development as a new skill in 2023^H4.

Again, pretty hilarious given how full featured and fast PHP is nowadays, but ok... I'm also gonna make a little private bet that PHP will outlast a fair amount of the currently trendy tooling...

I'm with you on the anti-PHP hate, but FWIW PHP and JavaScript came out exactly 6 months apart from each other, and one is the only way to code in the browser, so I'd say both are pretty likely to last a long time.

I don't know much about the PHP landscape but at least with Javascript it seems like trendy frameworks change every 5 years. JS -> JQuery -> AngularJS -> React -> Angular 2 -> React Hooks -> Next -> ... Feels like the "right" way to do things keeps changing.

The "right way" is subjective and the first mistake many people make IMO. What I think is the right way isn't always the right way for other people.

Tooling changing in JavaScript is unique to JavaScript only because of the language constraints. PHP, Ruby, etc are all controlled by the developer, whereas JavaScript is controlled by the browser vendors and end users of those browsers. You have more things to work around, inconsistencies to smooth over, and more importantly larger ambition on the frontend than most things can currently support, so new paradigms and frameworks come out to tackle that.

Also 5 years in internet time is a long time. So I'd probably not say it "changes so fast"

Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Shallow because...?

I was making a point that the best tool for the job can sometimes be the one which is widely used, hugely supported, cheap to host, well understood - it may not be the trendy choice, but "trendy" is not (in my humble opinion) a terribly good criteria for tech stack decisions...

It's not an interesting point, especially if you intend it as a tangential flamewar hook and, as you say yourself, you post it repetitively. The submission is not about 'tech stack decisions', it's somebody showing something they made. You don't have to like it or have much to say about it but a completely generic 'just use something else' is well within the scope of the guideline and a bunch of other ones.

…I’ll just leave this [0] here. A perfect example which just popped up in my feed list of “simple but does this job” tech. No js, no database, a $10 a month vps.

[0] https://alexcabal.com/posts/standard-ebooks-and-classic-web-...

Author mentioned that the reason for the new blog is to be easier to create posts. But doesn't mention much of what changed in the workflow. Seems he's using md files. But then what was he using before? If MD->MD, then what changed? Using Obsidian to be easier to edit and sync between devices?

The author is in the thread so if these are your specific questions or critiques, you should direct them there. 'It's hilarious to me they don't use Wordpress' is not a specific question or critique, it's a generic sneery putdown.

Sometimes the medium is the message. A web developer's blog can be a platform to show off their skills, and the blog itself is one way to do that.

Yeh, I get that - but then at the same time we have a web developers blog here with no RSS / feeds as far as I can see, no comments, no API, no OG tags - all the things one would expect from a blog. These seem to me a strange set of things to sacrifice in this context.

Wordpress is incredibly complex when compared to a static site that can be served ~entirely from a CDN. A database-backed blog has been outmoded now for years.

If you don't want a pre-built theme, you don't need the plugin ecosystem, and you don't need/want a WYSIWYG editor, there's no reason to choose Wordpress.

Is a blog a blog when it hasn’t got comments, feeds, categories, tags? I’d say not.

So: sure, if your cdn and static files can do all of those then yeh. But it can’t.

Eh, debating what's a "blog" and what's a "personal website" is splitting hairs.

Most "blogs" nowadays don't have the features you're talking about, because very few people actually care about them anymore. If you really want comments, you can add them via something like Disqus, but so few people are using RSS today that it's not worth bothering with.

The point I’m making is that we should choose tech that is relevant to the job in hand, not just because it’s the latest cool thing.

When I first started doing web stuff, ColdFusion, Perl, Flash and WAP were The Big Things at the time.

Not so much now.

It may seem like no-one can build anything on the web without having js through and through the stack - but actually you can, and sometimes you should. Even JavaScript will probably one day be relegated to the dustbin of a good idea we all once had…

Btw - this might be the wrong forum to diss RSS ;-)

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