Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Jeffgeerling.com has been migrated to Hugo

jeffgeerling.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 253 posts

Re: Jeffgeerling.com has been migrated to Hugo

#101

Post by begueradj »

zie1ony wrote: post #64
susam wrote: post #34

A few years ago, I decided to migrate my personal website to a Common Lisp (CL) based static site generator that I wrote myself. In hindsight, it is one of the best decisions I have made for my website. It started out at around 850 lines of code and has gradually grown to roughly 1500 lines. It handles statically rendering blog posts, arbitrary pages, a guestbook, comment pages, tag listings, per tag RSS feeds, a con…

How do you handle comments in a "static blog"?

Third party options (Disqus, for example)

Re: Jeffgeerling.com has been migrated to Hugo

#102

Post by susam »

zie1ony wrote: post #64
susam wrote: post #34

A few years ago, I decided to migrate my personal website to a Common Lisp (CL) based static site generator that I wrote myself. In hindsight, it is one of the best decisions I have made for my website. It started out at around 850 lines of code and has gradually grown to roughly 1500 lines. It handles statically rendering blog posts, arbitrary pages, a guestbook, comment pages, tag listings, per tag RSS feeds, a con…

How do you handle comments in a "static blog"?

> How do you handle comments in a "static blog"?

The comment form is implemented as a server-side program using Common Lisp and Hunchentoot. So this is the only part of the website that is not static. The server-side program accepts each comment and writes to a text file for manual review. Then I review the comments and add them to my blog.

In the end, the comments live like normal content files in my source code directory just like the other blog posts and HTML pages do. My static site generator renders the comment pages along with the rest of the website. So in effect, my static site generator also has a static comment pages generator within it.

Re: Jeffgeerling.com has been migrated to Hugo

#103

Post by 1dom »

geerlingguy wrote: post #61
1dom wrote: post #52

I think this is silly, and it's a hill I'm willing to die on. I wrote this in a comment yesterday, and Jeff has fully confirmed/vindicated this in his post: SSGs are good for static sites with no interactivity or feedback. If you want interactivity or feedback, someone (you or a 3rd party service provider) is going to have to run a server. If you're running a server anyway, it seems trivial to serve content dynamical…

I'm already self hosting my own cookieless analytics, and before, I hosted Drupal (LEMP stack) and Apache Solr on separate servers. I'm used to self-hosting, and any comment solution I use will be self-hosted as well (see: https://github.com/geerlingguy/jeffgeerling-com/issues/167 ) The code surface with SSG + 1 or 2 small self-hosted OSS tools is much, much smaller than it ever was running Drupal or another CMS.

Yes, SSG pipeline + 1 or 2 small self-hosted OSS tools is way simpler than Drupal.

But all you've done in bought on all the pain and compromise of having to think from an SSG perspective, and that created problems which you've already identified you'll figure out in future

I'm suggesting 2 or 3 small self-hosted OSS tools, where one is a small hand crafted server that basically takes a markdown file, renders it, and serves it as plain HTML with a header/footer.

This is more homogenous, fewer unique parts/processes, and doesn't have the constraint of dealing with an SSG.

I remember my own personal pain from 2010 - 2016ish of managing Drupal and Joomla. I did exactly the same as you in 2016 and went all in on SSGs and in 2024, I realised all of the above. I feel like I wasted years of potential development time reinventing basic personal website features to try and work with an SSG and you literally have a ticket to do just that: https://github.com/geerlingguy/jeffgeerling-com/issues/167. 1 of your 3 solutions involves letting someone else host your comments:(

A custom framework/server is the end destination for all nerdy personal websites - I can't wait to see what you make when you realise this:)

edit/p.s. I love you and all your work. Sorry for sounding disagreeable, I'm excited to see what you learn from you SSG journey, I hope you prove me wrong!

Re: Jeffgeerling.com has been migrated to Hugo

#104

Post by dangus »

cthor wrote: post #89
dangus wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shoehorn basic interactivity like comments? https://gohugo.io/content-management/comments/ This includes a giant list of open source commenting systems. I really don’t understand why people commonly say static site generators are a good candidate for building your own when there are a good selection of popular, stable options. The only thing I don’t like about Hugo is the experience of using other people’s themes.

https://cthor.me/SSG Getting someone else's SSG to do exactly what you want (and nothing more) takes longer than just building it yourself. Juice isn't worth the squeeze.

I disagree with your take there.

> It took me a weekend to write the initial Perl script that made this site. It took me another weekend to do the Rust rewrite (although porting all the content took two weeks). These are not complicated programs.

My last Hugo site took 30 minutes to deploy, not a whole weekend. Picked a theme, pasted in content.

> You want free web hosting? Hugo might be the right option.

An extremely good reason to pick Hugo especially if you don’t have the know-how to build your own SSG. You don’t need to know a programming language at all to use it.

Again, I have to throw criticism toward this idea that everyone who wants a static site generator already has the skills required to make one.

And I’m not saying it covers every use case like the kind of person who is willing to pay $100+ per year on a full blown solution like Shopify and Squarespace. It fits a niche: someone who wants their content online without coding with no hosting cost and doesn’t want to rely on third party platforms like Substack.

Re: Jeffgeerling.com has been migrated to Hugo

#105

Post by nickjj »

If you already write your posts in Markdown, it makes sense for sure.

About a year ago I converted my 500+ post Jekyll blog to Hugo, overall it's been a net win but boy do I find myself looking up syntax in the docs a lot. Thankfully not so much nowadays but figuring out the templating syntax was rough at the time.

Jeff, you don't have to set draft to false. You can separate your drafts into a different directory and use Hugo's cascade feature to handle it. Also you don't have to update the date in your frontmatter if you prefix the file with YYYY-MM-DD and configure Hugo to use that.

Just a heads up, you didn't mention this in your post but Hugo adds a trailing slash for pretty URLs. I don't know if you had them before but it's potentially new behavior and canonical URL differences unless you adjust for that.

When I did the switch from Jekyll to Hugo, I wrote a 10,000 word post with the gory details and how I used Python and shell scripts to automate converting the posts, plus covered all of the gotchas I encountered. There are sections focused on the above things I mentioned too: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/converting-my-500-page-blog-f...

Re: Jeffgeerling.com has been migrated to Hugo

#106

Post by 1dom »

creatonez wrote: post #90
1dom wrote: post #52

I think this is silly, and it's a hill I'm willing to die on. I wrote this in a comment yesterday, and Jeff has fully confirmed/vindicated this in his post: SSGs are good for static sites with no interactivity or feedback. If you want interactivity or feedback, someone (you or a 3rd party service provider) is going to have to run a server. If you're running a server anyway, it seems trivial to serve content dynamical…

> all an SSG pipeline adds is more dependencies and stuff to break. This is the exact opposite of what static site generation does.

Not if you're already running servers and server applications. If you already have patterns for running and deploying server software, an SSG requires an extra preprocessing step to generate the HTML for the server.

If you don't use an SSG, this step is done by virtue of the server running.

Re: Jeffgeerling.com has been migrated to Hugo

#107

Post by [deleted] »

dzink wrote: post #26

For long term stuff like a blog, nothing seems to beat static sites generated before deployment, instead of automated tools like Hugo. I tried Hugo years ago and some tiny config or update would suddenly expose all site variables to visitors, which was an incredible security risk. Wordpress and Drupal are a war zone of attacks - judging by the server logs of any of web site. These days you can custom write or design…

[deleted]

Re: Jeffgeerling.com has been migrated to Hugo

#108

Post by 1dom »

dangus wrote: post #69
1dom wrote: post #52

I think this is silly, and it's a hill I'm willing to die on. I wrote this in a comment yesterday, and Jeff has fully confirmed/vindicated this in his post: SSGs are good for static sites with no interactivity or feedback. If you want interactivity or feedback, someone (you or a 3rd party service provider) is going to have to run a server. If you're running a server anyway, it seems trivial to serve content dynamical…

Shoehorn basic interactivity like comments? https://gohugo.io/content-management/comments/ This includes a giant list of open source commenting systems. I really don’t understand why people commonly say static site generators are a good candidate for building your own when there are a good selection of popular, stable options. The only thing I don’t like about Hugo is the experience of using other people’s themes.

Pretty much every single option there involved letting a 3rd party collect and own the comments.

If you're fine for 3rd parties to own all your comments and content, why even take on the extra effort of hosting or managing or building your own website? That's basically what social media is for.

Re: Jeffgeerling.com has been migrated to Hugo

#109

Post by mbreese »

dijit wrote: post #3

I made the jump to Hugo too (from a managed service: svbtle) a long time ago, but I'll be really honest... I regret it. I decided to use an off-the-shelf theme, but it didn't quite meet the needs and I forked it; as it so happens Hugo breaks userland relatively often and a complex theme like the one I have requires a lot of maintenance. Like.. a lot . Now I can't really justify the time investment of fixing it so I j…

I had a similar issue, but with Jekyll. I had a customized theme and some update along the way broke everything. So, I very much agree with a sibling comment about not needing to update static site generators and it’s not just a Hugo thing. Sadly, my site was also being hosted/generated by GitHub, so I had no real choice in the update matter. (I’m not sure if pinning would have helped.)
Post reply on HN