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Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

>switch to a static site generator like Hugo or Zola

At that point just write your own HTML and never be beholden to some abstraction framework toolkit corporation cooperative ever again.

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Have you tried maintaining a blog with plain hand-written HTML? You need, at the least, single post pages (for permalinks), an index page, and an RSS feed — all slightly different views of the same content. It gets messy, and at some point you write your own SSG, which somehow becomes worse.

This is without going into how you ideally want an image pipeline, sitemaps, cards for twitter and stuff, maybe category pages, …

>Have you tried maintaining a blog with plain hand-written HTML?

Yes.

It's all a lot simpler than dealing with some abstraction framework toolkit, at least for me.

Maybe it's because I learned to write websites in the early 2000s where writing your own HTML and CSS was par for the course. You'd also write PHP or Ruby or ASP or something if you wanted to get fancy.

It's certainly easier until you have to deal with different views of the same content. I do not trust myself to keep things consistent, and neither should you.

Back in the day I'd have clobbered something together with SSIs to have, at least, a single copy of text to maintain, but that gets old quickly.

A determined and focused person can probably make do with single-post pages and a titles-only styled rss.

Hugo and Zola serve a wider audience.

>It's certainly easier until you have to deal with different views of the same content. I do not trust myself to keep things consistent, and neither should you.

I would argue that's not a "static" website, but even so that's still nothing some smart usage of PHP includes or the like can't easily solve.

The whole point of ssg is to run those "PHP includes" once.

You are completely right and the people down voting you are severely deranged. A HTML site + a wysiwyg solution like Surreal CMS is miles better than any site generators, easy to use for the client, and dirt cheap.

I find markdown to be a more productive way to write prose than HTML. It also shouldn't be too hard to port from one generator to another, given that the content is just markdown.

it isn't "just" markdown though. "top matter" and custom html tags and custom htm in-general kinda breaks the appeal.

Soon enough AI will write most of blog/marketing HTML.

And then we can develop systems that save user prompts, automatically and dynamically regenerating page content as the AI models are updated.

Add simple version control to keep history of changes.

Slap some workflow/approval process.

And you have a product!

Amazing. You just ruined the internet for everyone, making us all wade through heaps of meaningless bullshit, only generated to drive the ad revenue!

And do you know what’s the best part about that? You even made money off of that you can use to purchase the stuff you got ads for! Isn’t that exciting? Thank you for your service!

Yeah I'm sure my 3 line comment is to blame for whatever damage AI does to the internet.

I'll take the compliment anyway :)

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