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RIP Jekyll (The Genesis of the Jamstack)

bridgetownrb.com

71–80 of 187 posts

Re: RIP Jekyll (The Genesis of the Jamstack)

#72

Am I missing something, or is Jekyll still receiving fairly active contributions[1]? Even by that (misleading) metric, it doesn't seem to be dead. Expecting maintainers to tilt at the newest windmill instead of actually maintain is a critical part of why so many in the open source community burn out. [1]: https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/commits/master

Maybe this is just clickbait? Jekyll is in a fine state for an extremely mature project. It would be extremely souring to me if Jekyll decided to add webpack and other javascript dependencies with a newer version. One of the things I like about Jekyll is that it's a STATIC site generator that doesn't try to do everything. Some sites I want to be dead simple, and that's what you get with Jekyll. If I want more complex…

> Jekyll is in a fine state for an extremely mature project.

That's my impression as well, as an outsider.

A recurring nightmare of mine as a maintainer is that I'll wake up one day and read someone's blog proclaiming the death of one of my projects, when all I've done is stopped adding new features to it. Especially so when it's someone who's made a living for themselves as a downstream user.

And I'm in the same boat as you: I've had a Jekyll-based blog, without incident, for a little bit under a decade now. It's only gotten faster and easier to use over time, which is more than I even asked for.

Re: RIP Jekyll (The Genesis of the Jamstack)

#73
post #40

The thing I love about Jekyll and other SSGs is being able to build my site into a bunch of static files and put every single one of those files on my own server, on IPFS, or even just for offline viewing, so there's no need to leak requests to the Cloudflares/Amazons/Googles of the world. Meanwhile "the Jamstack" seems to be the exact opposite of that, a privacy nightmare all about gluing together micro-APIs that I…

Because we live in an age in which DIY/solo development isn't respected anymore. Devs today think nothing of filling-up 500Mb with node modules just to generate a static site. I've even seen SSG's in Docker images.

Re: RIP Jekyll (The Genesis of the Jamstack)

#74

Am I missing something, or is Jekyll still receiving fairly active contributions[1]? Even by that (misleading) metric, it doesn't seem to be dead. Expecting maintainers to tilt at the newest windmill instead of actually maintain is a critical part of why so many in the open source community burn out. [1]: https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/commits/master

I dunno, if you look at the releases instead (https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/releases), they were doing monthly releases for a long time, and now it's been 6 months without a release. The last was April 2021, and OP quotes the "release maintainer" of Jekyll as declaring Jekyll dead in "May 2021"...

Sounds like a "Hotel California" repo now, if you follow me. Which is unacceptable for a lot of distributors/users (are they just going to package random git HEAD snapshots whenever they feel like it, now that releases are apparently de facto banned?).

Re: RIP Jekyll (The Genesis of the Jamstack)

#75
post #4

What do people use besides Jekyll?

Instead of a traditional static site generator, put some content at /colophon that lists the transformations that need to be applied to produce the desired output, and then have a machine perform those steps.

Re: RIP Jekyll (The Genesis of the Jamstack)

#76
post #68

I dont often say this on the internet but WFT? I am autistic. I love coding. A single person can create wonderful software that is a gift to everyone as open source. I hate trying to be an extrovert and engage with a lot of people. I hate twitter and discord Does that mean that I and people like me cannot do open source in 2021? Most of these seem like detriments more than anything. * Engagement on Twitter * Official…

Good technology alone isn't enough to lead to adoption. Tiddlywiki, imo, is the best personal blogging tools. It is a static site, it got an embedded editor, it got cool concepts realised like transclusion, among many others. Go ask around, I bet hardly anyone talks about it. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? https://tiddlywiki.com/

Having looked quite a bit for personal docs stores: tiddlywiki is definitely very interesting and fits its niche pretty well, and I too will highly recommend people take a look at it, but it's just not viable in many cases.

E.g. mobile requires a browser plugin (... which is a broken link, and there seem to be both few alternatives and they have reviews that imply there may be problems) or separate app to allow saving[1]. iOS requires a separate app[2]. Sync occurs in one giant html file, so if you edit one word, the whole thing has to be re-synced (so using it for any moderate amount of media is a no-go) (this is both a great feature for hosting-free purposes, and a great curse). Much of this has been due to browsers clamping down on permissions.

To work around those, your main option is to... use a web server to host it. If you do that, then tiddlywiki is basically just another self-hostable web server with an interesting UI - there are quite a few also-good competitors in that space.

[1]: https://tiddlywiki.com/static/GettingStarted%2520-%2520Andro... [2]: https://tiddlywiki.com/static/GettingStarted%2520-%2520iOS.h...

Re: RIP Jekyll (The Genesis of the Jamstack)

#78
post #74

Am I missing something, or is Jekyll still receiving fairly active contributions[1]? Even by that (misleading) metric, it doesn't seem to be dead. Expecting maintainers to tilt at the newest windmill instead of actually maintain is a critical part of why so many in the open source community burn out. [1]: https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/commits/master

I dunno, if you look at the releases instead ( https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/releases ), they were doing monthly releases for a long time, and now it's been 6 months without a release. The last was April 2021, and OP quotes the "release maintainer" of Jekyll as declaring Jekyll dead in "May 2021"... Sounds like a "Hotel California" repo now, if you follow me. Which is unacceptable for a lot of distributors/users (…

This is where my outsider's perspective falls short: assuming that the old release maintainer isn't actively preventing the project from appointing a new release maintainer, what stops them from just keeping on?

Deviations from their previous release schedule are certainly noteworthy, but release schedules also naturally length as projects mature.

And then there's the Theseus-type questions: if Jekyll changes its name because the current maintainers have lost access to the RubyGems credentials, is it really not Jekyll anymore? It occurs to me that OSS is replete with `${project}-ng` namings, the `ng` suffix typically indicating that the project serves the same purpose as its original form but has been moved to a different namespace for whatever reason. If Jekyll's current maintainers were to publish `jekyll-ng` on RubyGems, I'd be inclined to call that a continuation of the original Jekyll for all extents and purposes.

Re: RIP Jekyll (The Genesis of the Jamstack)

#79
post #66

I dont often say this on the internet but WFT? I am autistic. I love coding. A single person can create wonderful software that is a gift to everyone as open source. I hate trying to be an extrovert and engage with a lot of people. I hate twitter and discord Does that mean that I and people like me cannot do open source in 2021? Most of these seem like detriments more than anything. * Engagement on Twitter * Official…

I think there’s a terminology gap that the article doesn’t do a great job with. Open source in 2021 does not require anything on the list. But to be a widely deployed open source project does generally require those kinds of things. As the parallel commenter noted, it doesn’t need to specifically be Discord or GitHub or Twitter or whatever, but to have mass adoption, the project needs to have directionality and momen…

Thanks for explaining that better than I could apparently. Yes, obviously any software with a F/L/OSS license is "open source" but to build and sustain a community around a project of significance in 2021, there are some additional measures required.

Re: RIP Jekyll (The Genesis of the Jamstack)

#80

Am I missing something, or is Jekyll still receiving fairly active contributions[1]? Even by that (misleading) metric, it doesn't seem to be dead. Expecting maintainers to tilt at the newest windmill instead of actually maintain is a critical part of why so many in the open source community burn out. [1]: https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/commits/master

Maybe this is just clickbait? Jekyll is in a fine state for an extremely mature project. It would be extremely souring to me if Jekyll decided to add webpack and other javascript dependencies with a newer version. One of the things I like about Jekyll is that it's a STATIC site generator that doesn't try to do everything. Some sites I want to be dead simple, and that's what you get with Jekyll. If I want more complex…

Is Hugo built with Ruby? Is Gatsby? Why are we saying that someone can only use the biggest Ruby-based SSG if they want something incredibly simple that will never change, otherwise they need to look somewhere else. Rails has never had that limited value prop for example.
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