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Comment by charles_f | Hacker News Reader

I've been using the same version of Jekyll, using the same outdated, discontinued version of ruby, for more than 10y. I refuse to learn anything about ruby, or spend any time upgrading Jekyll or any of the 2 plug-ins I use, and I take a weird pride in that. It works, it generates my blog, I don't want it to do anything else. I have no idea how it works anymore. For all I know Jekyll has been abandoned. That version of ruby might be riddled with bugs and security holes, and why would I care? it's only used when I generate the website, in a docker container that doesn't talk to anything.

Eleventy might not receive new features, your website will still work.

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> Eleventy might not receive new features, your website will still work.

The beauty of SSGs, in one sentence, folks.

I'm not aware of any CVEs in HTML, either.

> The beauty of SSGs, in one sentence, folks

Incidentally, also the curse, for the authors who attempt to monetize SSGs: most users prioritize control, and don't clamor for new features. A nightmare combination for *aaS peddlers.

> Incidentally, also the curse.

Too true. The coin has two sides.

Same here 10+ years on Jekyll, old Ruby version, zero interest in changing it. I run it in a container too. It just works. It generates HTML and HTML still works. I'll be on this setup for another 10 years.

Same here. I have multiple sites working on Jekyll for almost 10 years as well. I’ve considered moving on to other frameworks such as 11ty and tried local versions for the sake of learning and “upgrading”. But in the end Jekyll still works flawlessly and is very easy to maintain. I use a newer version of Ruby though.

Of course your point is 100% true and very valid. Have an upvote.

> For all I know Jekyll has been abandoned.

Side Note Spoiler: it's still kickin'. I try to keep my things on Debian-stable, and am the primary maintainer of about five websites managed by Jekyll. There was a Ruby 3 and it required like 20 minutes to get things working again. I wish all software required this little attention!

Ha, I had a similar story with Jekyll but my build wasn't containerised. At some point it stopped being compatible with the latest [something. Ruby? Gems? I don't care, just build my fucking HTML templates please] so I just migrated to Hugo.

I stuck around on Hugo for quite some time and I've never had any such issues yet, but now I've also wrapped the build in Nix. So yeah I'll do the same - if it ever stops working I'll just pin the build inputs at the last version that worked.

I _think_ the Hugo folks seem to understand the "just build my fucking HTML templates" principle. I.e. for most use cases the job of a static site generator is simple enough that breaking compatibility is literally never justified. So hopefully pinning won't be necessary.

Just last week updating Hugo broke my templates. That‘s happening every few months. They deprecate and then remove or rename template variables like crazy.

Great tool, though.

Yeah, I really don't understand why some developers have an extreme compulsion to constantly deprecate and rename things like this, causing massive upgrade headaches to users.

In addition to Hugo, it happens constantly in GoReleaser. In both cases, they're excellent tools, but the unending renaming spree is just awful. Weirdly, both are in the Go ecosystem, which generally values backwards compatibility.

Reminds me that LaTeX has been throwing a depreciation warning for 20+ years on something.

Damn that's interesting I have not run into that at all after about 4 years.

Maybe it's just that my site is extremely dumb? I forked an "ultra minimal" theme and deleted most of its code. So perhaps I just use such a tiny subset of the template system that I haven't been affected.

I was in the same boat! I love Ruby so the language isn't an issue, but I generally do not like Jekyll. I especially find the template system very limiting. That is especially disappointing since ERB is pretty great. I wish that had been a first class feature.

I use it to generate my resume, and I went almost 10 years without updating Jekyll. Since Claude has come on the scene, I used it to upgrade everything to the latest and it was quite painless. There's something beautiful about a system that is so stable. Sinatra especially is a joy, because it has been so stable for so many years.

I'm in the same Jekyll boat! If it works, it works.

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