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The End of Eleventy

brennan.day

21–30 of 195 posts

Re: The End of Eleventy

#21
post #5

SSGs versus Wordpress is surprisingly still a battle… I’m genuinely shocked at the number of sites on the Net that use Wordpress, dynamically assembling markup with PHP for every page view, risking constant hacking and stuff, when they have a total of like 7 or 100 pages, which could all be pre-rendered to HTML files in roughly 8 seconds on even a junky laptop or X-small ec2 instance. It really is okay. For those who…

Wordpress has:

* the ability to schedule posts

* a ton of plugins

* a lot of people who know how to use it

* a reasonable WYSIWYG interface

As far as I know, most SSGs fall down on one or more of those dimensions.

Re: The End of Eleventy

#22

My personal page runs on 11ty since the last 3 years and I enjoyed it a lot. I’ll probably replace it with pure HTML soon - I found that I don’t need a SSG anymore, I can just use a local LLM to generate HTML out of markdown files and I never use any fancy features anyway.

I'm also using 11ty on a couple projects, but I abhore the npm ecosystem.

I'm considering letting an LLM generate a flat python script to replace what 11ty does for me. Once removed from the fracas, it should be stable for decades.

Re: The End of Eleventy

#23
post #5

SSGs versus Wordpress is surprisingly still a battle… I’m genuinely shocked at the number of sites on the Net that use Wordpress, dynamically assembling markup with PHP for every page view, risking constant hacking and stuff, when they have a total of like 7 or 100 pages, which could all be pre-rendered to HTML files in roughly 8 seconds on even a junky laptop or X-small ec2 instance. It really is okay. For those who…

Ironically, one of the original major reasons WordPress became popular was its dynamic nature. It dethroned Movable Type, which was an extremely powerful and extensible static site generator.

It's wild to me that this post's timeline makes no mention whatsoever of Movable Type, and at one point it links to another author's post titled "A Complete History of Static: The Beginning to WordPress Headless" which also makes no mention whatsoever of Movable Type. Now I feel old :/

Re: The End of Eleventy

#24

Didn't read because of the fuckery with the mouse pointer. Why do sites have to do this crap.

Are you calling a custom mouse icon crap/fuckery that makes you leave the site, or was there something I missed? If you are that's a pretty big overreaction. And it's probably worth you setting the single line to disable `cursor` on all sites via userContent.css or a styling extension.

Re: The End of Eleventy

#25

My personal page runs on 11ty since the last 3 years and I enjoyed it a lot. I’ll probably replace it with pure HTML soon - I found that I don’t need a SSG anymore, I can just use a local LLM to generate HTML out of markdown files and I never use any fancy features anyway.

Yes, I find LLMs are great for taking loosely-structured text and turning them into formatted blog posts. https://notes.npilk.com/chatgpt-is-my-ssg

Re: The End of Eleventy

#26
post #21
post #5

SSGs versus Wordpress is surprisingly still a battle… I’m genuinely shocked at the number of sites on the Net that use Wordpress, dynamically assembling markup with PHP for every page view, risking constant hacking and stuff, when they have a total of like 7 or 100 pages, which could all be pre-rendered to HTML files in roughly 8 seconds on even a junky laptop or X-small ec2 instance. It really is okay. For those who…

Wordpress has: * the ability to schedule posts * a ton of plugins * a lot of people who know how to use it * a reasonable WYSIWYG interface As far as I know, most SSGs fall down on one or more of those dimensions.

3rd bullet. I do a ton of WordPress at work. Clients asked for it because they know how to use it.

Re: The End of Eleventy

#27

My personal page runs on 11ty since the last 3 years and I enjoyed it a lot. I’ll probably replace it with pure HTML soon - I found that I don’t need a SSG anymore, I can just use a local LLM to generate HTML out of markdown files and I never use any fancy features anyway.

I'm also using 11ty on a couple projects, but I abhore the npm ecosystem. I'm considering letting an LLM generate a flat python script to replace what 11ty does for me. Once removed from the fracas, it should be stable for decades.

If using an LLM why bother with python? Go for straight shell scripts.

Re: The End of Eleventy

#28
post #5

SSGs versus Wordpress is surprisingly still a battle… I’m genuinely shocked at the number of sites on the Net that use Wordpress, dynamically assembling markup with PHP for every page view, risking constant hacking and stuff, when they have a total of like 7 or 100 pages, which could all be pre-rendered to HTML files in roughly 8 seconds on even a junky laptop or X-small ec2 instance. It really is okay. For those who…

I recently moved all my website from WordPress. In last few year couple of them had got hacked via plugin exploits as well. I had to use "security" plugins after that i didn't have any issue but still...

I crawled own website and downloaded each, and converted to markdown then used static site generator (custom in javascript)

runs on cloudflare pages for free with no downtimes or "fee".

if you want to see result: https://aretecodex.pages.dev/guides/recomposition

Couple of problems:

To edit content i've to use "image paste" plugin and configure its base directory, image path in project setting in .vscode

I lost the comment/upvote feature.

I lost "search"

Re: The End of Eleventy

#29
post #17

The thing about SSGs is that you only need a small percentage of the functionality they offer and for what: so instead of some simple syntax for links you can remember in HTML description there is something weird and irregular I always have to look up in the manual in Markdown and all sorts of other Markdown WTFs. Every time I tried to get started on a personal site with an SSG I would get depressed looking at hundre…

https://soupault.net/ is about using plain HTML, but doing index pages, RSS feeds and so on from that. You even get away with not having frontmatter, because CSS like selectors allow those meta pages to retrieve title, date etc. from the HTML pages.

Hah, of course it’s written in Ocaml!

As a learning exercise, I wrote my own little SSG in ocaml, and man I forgot how nice a language it is. Tooling is still a bit rough but lots better than it used to be

My little blog (in my profile) is built using it: https://github.com/girvo/jgirvin_blog_ocaml

Horrible Ocaml I’m sure, but between YOCaml and Soupault, the best SSGs are all written in this language. Fascinating really

Re: The End of Eleventy

#30
The author seems to think that there's only one type of user of these tools. Namely people who use NeoCities. They're all that matter to him.

Way back in 2015 I was building a large static site using Jekyll and Wordpress CMS as a backend. We had 30+ content editors using it, writing Markdown and I had Jekyll Generator that would execute a SQL query against the Wordpress database to build static content. Every new post would build and deploy the whole site in 2-3 minutes. Over 50k pages of content. This powered a very large marketing website straddling multiple top 10 Google Ad keywords. Business was bringing in several hundred million in ARR.

I knew of at least 3 other similarly large businesses doing this. All the way back in 2015. My current company today builds a static site from a Wordpress backend and I was totally uninvolved in this work (or even suggesting it). The user that this author thinks is a fable is very very real. There is absolutely a market for a CMS backend for an SSG.

Not that I as a developer would have used it, but if my employers could have paid a company for what I built in a nice box instead of paying my salary, they would have.

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