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Comment by hobarrera | Hacker News Reader

I had the same question.

The answer is awfully:

1) I don't see how it generates static websites. It generates pages on-demand: http://thisisvoid.org/article/05-perf.

2) The documentation is a tribute to it's name: null.

3) PHP (AFAIK) doesn't do nice URLs like "/articles/article-7", so my guess is that there's some additional configuration done to the web server. Ugly (compared to Jekyll's stupid-simple solution to this).

4) You seem to need to fork it in order to use it (rather than being able to install it and use it as you would any other tool).

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I think you miss the point.

You compare :

* Jekyll which is a great tool, with lots of features, but which has at least 50 files & probably 1000s of line of code. It's great but I wouldn't be able to understand 100% of how it works in 2 hours. Impossible. Moreover I cannot install gem (and probably not Jekyll) on my shared hosting. Huh...

* Void, my toy-website-creation-tool (yes, I have no problem with that: it's a toy tool): you can understand 100% of how it works by reading less than 100 lines. Nothing more. You can install it on a shared hosting, only requirement: Apache + PHP.

Yes, you need to open and hack the PHP file of Void to customize. What's the problem with that? It's done on purpose.

Is it mandatory nowadays to use many tools like Brew, Composer, Gem, Symfony, etc. to set up a simple website? (I mixed random names that are required in lots of CMS/static generators I found).

My answer is no: you can do something simple with a "hack it yourself" philosophy. And less of 100 lines of code.

You only have to install Jekyll locally, it generates plain-jain html files. Thanks for the info on the differences. Congrats on making a neat tool, I was just legitimately curious as to how they would compare. Cheers!

Oh sure, no problem at all, of course it is legitimate and interesting!

(the polemic part of my answer was related with the other message "The answer is awfully: ..." )

> * Jekyll which is a great tool, with lots of features, but which has at least 50 files & probably 1000s of line of code. It's great but I wouldn't be able to understand 100% of how it works in 2 hours.

Do you need to understand the internals of every tool you use? Do you know how the PHP interpreter works, the kernel, etc?

> Moreover I cannot install gem (and probably not Jekyll) on my shared hosting. Huh...

Why would you install a development tool on the server? Do you install gcc on servers too? That makes no sense at all.

> You can install it on a shared hosting, only requirement: Apache + PHP.

This pretty much reinforces my point: it does not generate static pages, and actually generates them on request-time.

> My answer is no: you can do something simple with a "hack it yourself" philosophy. And less of 100 lines of code.

Indeed, you can do that. You can also hack your own. gp's question was how this compared to Jekyll, and that's what I answered.

> Do you need to understand the internals of every tool you use?

If possible, I like to understand. For Wordpress, I can't (too big). For simple projects, I can and I enjoy it!

> Why would you install a development tool on the server? Do you install gcc on servers too?

At the moment of my last comment, I didn't know at all how Jekyll works, and knew nothing, zero, about Ruby. Never used in my life. Thus my comment. I had a quick look, in the meantime.

> it does not generate static pages, and actually generates them on request-time.

Exactly. Like a CMS, like a blog, like a Wordpress. I never said my tool generates static HTML that should be uploaded to server after each new article. I don't want this by the way. (True that some people thought it was a static generator. My bad, because few documentation yet (currently writing it...))

> gp's question was how this compared to Jekyll, and that's what I answered.

Sure, no problem. I just don't understand why the awfully in your comment. The point of this tool is not to be a static generator. I never said that. Why is it "awful" to just drop .txt files into the server, and let the server and PHP generate content on request-time?

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