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Comment by snow_mac | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I don't get why people chose Vue, React, Next etc... for their blog. Maybe it makes sense for comments but I write all of my posts in markdown and run it through jekyl. I don't support comments, because I post it on places like Facebook, Hacker News, Dev.to where comments already exist on that platform. Why reinvent the wheel? Furthermore, generating a statically loaded HTML site that references 1 style sheet, a couple of images makes the site infinitely faster to load and cache for future visits.

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I enjoy Jekyll, and run about 6 live websites with it.

But lately I’ve been using Gatsby/React, first out of curiosity, but now because it’s much quicker for me to develop.

Jekyll’s partials are nice to use but can become hard to read when there are too many variations, or if there are things to be calculated per instance. The Liquid template engine is quite limited.

Also, I absolutely love React’s CSS Modules, which solves the namespacing of Jekyll’s partials.

And in general I find working with React components much easier.

I still use Jekyll for tiny projects [1], but go the Gatsby way for more complex stuff.

[1] https://f1standings.com/

Love your F1 site! Making it my home page.

> Why reinvent the wheel?

Because sometimes it's fun, and when you're doing it for personal projects it's up to you what route you want to go down. Wordpress or Ghost would be valid choices, too.

I imagine there are people out there who would find it easier to get a Next / React blog setup than to work with Jekyll, because they're familiar with JS and have never heard of or touched Ruby.

> because they're familiar with JS and have never heard of or touched Ruby

I used Jekyll on a couple of project and never had to touch Ruby, but Eleventy is a better option for JS devs.

Has the 11ty community gotten better at tutorials and adoption materials? One of the reasons why I went with gatsby is that there are many blogs about how to add tags to your site, i18n, etc?

One of the issues I had with 11ty in the past was that it was hard to get started. At least with gatsby they provide a guided experience with a bunch of community content to get you through.

Not sure about now, I haven't messed with it in almost a year.

In general I found it straightforward but I had a couple of headscratching moments and the docs weren't super helpful.

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