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Never used movable type, but if somebody made a fast static website generator with a web GUI, a decent online editor and a good plugin system, along with an easy-to-setup deployment system, why wouldn't people pick it up? Apart from the fact that they already use Wordpress, but this has no bearing on the dynamic-vs-static website generator debate. There is nothing intrinsic about static website generator that makes them harder to use.

But of course, in this case you should not aim for the sexy "minimal" label (or better, write a GUI leveraging an existing system).

Well that kinda was Movable Type in a nutshell. I think it lost because people actually frequently want dynamic content (even if it's for something as simple as a contact form, or comments).

I think some guy named Kolmogorov beat you to that law.

Looks like my standard disclaimer is correct again.

http://chester.id.au/standard-disclaimer/

Chester's Zeroth Law: He's never had an original idea, only good ideas that sometimes he doesn't know are unoriginal.

If you haven't read Neal Stephenson's Anathem, you should. (That idea is called Saunt Lora's Proposition -- all possible ideas have already been found -- in the book. Good stuff.)

"Confound those who have said our remarks before us" -- Aelius Donatus, circa 4th century AD.

Chester's First Law shouldn't be a law. Essential complexity varies at different levels of abstraction and abstractions are what causes them to change. So, it isn't a conserved quantity.

Computer tech and even programming is a great example of complexity being reduced, in some cases, as an abstraction is added.

Note that I said in the problem domain. You can absolutely reduce complexity in the solution domain through abstraction, but somebody somewhere has payed the piper to sustain that illusion.

I think the biggest barrier to ordinary users using a static site generator lies right here:

>Installation >Install pyinotify. bash pip install pyinotify

I mean, considering the ordinary user we're talking about doesn't code and on top of that, probably runs Windows, well...

If you're serious about Windows support, I'm guessing that you could use msys to make a zip (that's Windows for "tarball") with everything pre-installed. Then have people point-and-click on the launcher.

Of course, nowadays I hear devs have to pay Microsoft to have the privilege of not having Windows call their products viruses...

The author's choice is still subject to fads, to what's in vogue, to the zeitgeist.

And as of late, the static generation fervor has been getting stronger.

Blogger used to (maybe still does?) have an FTP option that would render a static version of your blog and push it to your own hosting account.

Personally, that's what I'd like to see. A cms or email based blog that generates the static files and pushes them to whatever service/host you want (Dropbox, s3, github, FTP, SFTP, etc).

> Personally, that's what I'd like to see. A cms or email based blog that generates the static files and pushes them to whatever service/host you want (Dropbox, s3, github, FTP, SFTP, etc).

This is what I've been doing, after Posterous announced its retirement: http://code.dealmeida.net/nefelibata. You generate a static website from markdown files, publish it to configurable services (S3 initially, but it's plugin based), announce it to social networks (FB and Twitter). The idea is also that it will collect comments from FB and Twitter and add them to the static pages, so that discussion can happen on the social network du jour, but content will remain forever.

Blogger disabled that option a few years back.

Some of us might even remember that before Blogspot came to, you had to have access to a server via FTP to publish.

How about some caching/proxy layer on top of Wordpress that both creates AND serves the static versions of the pages?

I mean, I think that's what some of the caching plugins do now , but in my experience they require a ton a configuration (e.g. a 100+ line .htaccess file). Plus I'm just not a fan of WP in general.

I see what you're getting at here, but how does WordPress push complexity towards the user?

>Wordpress won inter alia because the cost of the complexity was pushed from the authors to the readers

In what way does wordpress push complexity to readers?

They have to pay for the rendering of the page for every visit, instead of the author paying for rendering at creation time.

At no time did the problem that somehow the page had to be rendered go away.

Wait a second, wouldn't it be more accurate to say the complexity had been pushed into the browser, affecting the browser developers perhaps. The reader might just have to pay in terms of waiting longer to read. Or do you mean "reader" is the browser software. The thread of the discussion started with (I thought) the difficulty for the non-technical user to install and use a static site generator?

I do think the concept of "conservation of complexity" has some analytical value in the design of software systems.

I think that it'll never be a mathematically sound rule, so "Law" is a bit of poetic license. But I think it is a useful heuristic.

I've felt this way for a long time about lots of particular design/architecture debates, but this is the first time I've been able to consolidate them to a single statement.

Wordpress is successfull because it is easy to install and hosting is cheap. Furthermore the basic wordpress set has very little capabilities. (but they are 100% blogger oriented)

However wordpress is a pain to customize and extend, i always found drupal was easier to customize for non developpers ( you have to mess with php pretty fast with wordpress ). Drupal is on the contrary a little more complicated to setup , but the basic set up is more powerfull than wordpress ( and the plugin system is better ).

That's why i dont think non php scripts can be popular to non programmers. you can just drop some python or some ruby on a webserver and expect it to work just like php does,

And few shared hosting providers support mod_python or stuff like that ( which is the shame because i see no reason why mod_python is worse than mod_php and we would have a whole generation of better programmers if people used python over php).

To clear up some confusion:

> Wordpress won inter alia because ...

"inter alia" is a short hand that roughly means "amongst other things, which I won't list here because it would obscure the point I am trying to make".

"Amongst other things" is the literal translation.

"Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent." (George Orwell, Politics and the English Language[1])

[1] http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit...

I love that essay.

Can you give an equivalent word which conveys the full meaning of inter alia with the same degree of pithiness and directness?

"One reason Wordpress won is..."

"Wordpress won because..., for one."

A word is none of direct, forceful, or brief if your audience must look it up to understand.

> A word is none of direct, forceful, or brief if your audience must look it up to understand.

Good point.

"Among other things" is one equivalent. Note that inter alia is a phrase, so you should probably be asking for an equivalent phrase and not a word.

>with the same degree of pithiness and directness?

I think you overestimate the degree of both "pithiness and directness" in this particular use of the phrase.

Perhaps the Latin was counterproductive in this context.

But it's such a handy shorthand :(

yeah, but you're pushing the complexity away from the author and onto the reader who needs to decode it, and the readers don't like it ;)

If you wanted a shortcut you could have tried Chinese.

It would have taken only one or two characters as opposed to 10, and you would be using a living language with more speakers than latin (including people that only know latin quotations and a few generic phrases).

While if I was deciding what terms to choose ab initio from the universe of all possible words in all possible languages, my alibi here is that I studied law for a few years. Most of the phrases I picked up en route are mostly obiter dicta, et cetera, with only limited utility. Others are enormously useful; "inter alia" has escaped into other parts of academia.

But while ceteris paribus it might be the case that I could use Chinese characters, English has a far greater de facto affinity to, and stock of, Latin due to the historical connection commencing in the 1066 Norman Conquest and the imposition of the lingua Franca.

>While if I was deciding what terms to choose ab initio from the universe of all possible words in all possible languages, my alibi here is that I studied law for a few years.

Well, you should also work on the "syntax" thing, for I find the first phrase above ("while if...") incomplete.

That said, you studied law? That makes two of us. Only in my case, "studied" mostly means I've watched every "Boston Legal" and "Law and Order" episode.

>Most of the phrases I picked up en route are mostly obiter dicta, et cetera, with only limited utility. Others are enormously useful; "inter alia" has escaped into other parts of academia.

Has it escaped because it is enormously useful, though, or because it makes for "pretty" and "refined-sounding" phrasing? Because academia is full of such, well, to put it succinctly, bullshit. (I admit that in law it can be well known and have an additional well defined role that augments the standard latin meaning).

>But while ceteris paribus it might be the case that I could use Chinese characters, English has a far greater de facto affinity to, and stock of, Latin due to the historical connection commencing in the 1066 Norman Conquest and the imposition of the lingua Franca.

Sure, but with the Chinese conquest of the economy and commerce space, commencing circa 1995 and the slow financial, diplomatic and cultural decline of the US, one could say that the era of the previous lingua Franca is over.

Res ipsa loquitur.

Err, I mean 用事实说话.

(Come to think of it: does this succinctness mean that the Chinese can write their whole life story in Twitter with room to spare?)

Movable Type ran on every host that Wordpress supported, no?

Earlier versions were written in Perl, so no.