Well yes, but your website has a dozen pages, wasn't updated in 6 years, and is as interactive as a sheet of paper. Do consider that some people tackle slightly harder problems.
My stack is HTML+CSS
81–90 of 194 posts
Re: My stack is HTML+CSS
#82Sure, it's super easy when your page doesn't have even a header and/or a footer. Try having a top-menu in your design, or some banners/ads, and then you need to change ALL the pages to change a single url. This is how we used to do things long time ago, and it sucked BIG TIME, and that's why people invented server-side includes and cgi and mod_php and all of that... it saves time, and your time costs much more than h…
My article covers that: > So... if I don’t use any templating system, how do I update my header, footer or nav? Well, simply by using the ”Replace in files” feature of any good text editor. They don’t need frequent updates anyway. The benefits of using a templating system is not worth the cost of introducing the tooling it requires.
>The benefits of using a templating system is not worth the cost of introducing the tooling it requires.
Other people use static site generation, you use search and replace in your editor - not much of difference. Your approach is slower in long term, but with your on average 1 article per year it will take some time until you reach the threshold.
Re: My stack is HTML+CSS
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are lots of different MD flavours, though. And even with Pandoc extensions you cannot really have an image inside with and alt text and title text.
Most near-trivial to rewrite to each other's format though, which means you can get any static generator to ingest your favourite flavour with only a one-time step possibly (but almost certainly not) required to teach it how to ingest a format that isn't a perfect match for what it expects.
A couple of years back, I helped move Fastmail’s blog from a home-grown thing from the mid-2000s that used Markdown.pl, to Ghost. It was nowhere near trivial. Line break behaviour changed, handling of indentation changed, treatment of raw HTML and Markdown characters within HTML tags changed… I fixed everything I noticed, but there was a lot of incompatibility, and old posts would have looked uniformly bad without some of the fixes we applied.
Re: My stack is HTML+CSS
#84"will never have any security vulnerability" that is a good joke considering that css keyloggers have been around since a while
Re: My stack is HTML+CSS
#85While I really like the idea of serving raw HTML and CSS, I think that on the authoring side, a static site generator that ingests Markdown and generates HTML is a more practical way to go. I think writing raw HTML can work fine for small pages, and arguably it can be better than Markdown for pages with a lot of design elements, like landing pages. But for the typical blog post, or especially if the blog post has cod…
With that, you can't even tell me why the text it italicized. Markdown mostly sucks.
Re: My stack is HTML+CSS
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
"My personal website with 4 pages doesn't need a CMS!"
This comment presents a caricatured perspective of those it opposes by using a made-up quote (it doesn't seem to have actually been said by anyone anywhere), and it doesn't really do anything for the discussion that wasn't already covered by the parent comment it's attached to. Please, folks, don't encourage people to post low-effort noise by upvoting comments like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13602947
I agree it could have been phrased more nicely, but it actually pointed out something valid, which I didn't catch at first. The author hasn't written any posts in 5 years, and has ~15 total since 2010:
As someone who blogs regularly, I'm more interested in the toolchain of people who HAVE done significant writing. I read blogs for at least a decade before I wrote one, and it's harder than it seems, and coercing a good result out of tools isn't easy.
In fact I just wrote a few of my own tools to fix the image problem, e.g. http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/01/blog-roadmap.html#unix-...
Basically, the author's strategy is not likely to last (though it's not impossible). My blog started out very minimal, but as you write, you bump into the need for more automation and tools. My site looks very simple and minimal, but there is a surprising amount underneath.
Funny comic: https://rakhim.org/honestly-undefined/19/
When I was writing those tools I often wondered if we should just go back to Spolsky's CityDesk. It was a Windows GUI that would FTP HTML and images to a static server! I remember trying it briefly in the early 2000's. Although his blog also rotted due to CityDesk rotting! It's a hard problem.
Re: My stack is HTML+CSS
#87I feel like there should be some better way to recognize and promote solutions that are future proof. Like transpilers and site generators that only produce vanilla code for deployment. Because it wouldn't matter how dated the tool is. Sticking to vanilla only is not the only option. But I guess there could still be vulnerabilities in HTML that may need to be addressed? Like cross domain or cookie security... But the…
The thing, auto-censureship should fit in, as well as the code a-n-d hardware life-lines, including how to reproduce the workflow outside of corporate claws.
Re: My stack is HTML+CSS
#88> Sometimes, for drafting long blog articles, I’m working in Google Docs, and when I’m happy, export the content to clean HTML using an add-on.
Oh, but as he said earlier in the post, relying on a static site generator that you can install and run locally is unacceptable. That makes sense.
Re: My stack is HTML+CSS
#89Great for information but no so much for application.
Once you get into forms and submissions you can’t do no-js anymore.
Re: My stack is HTML+CSS
#90Sure, it's super easy when your page doesn't have even a header and/or a footer. Try having a top-menu in your design, or some banners/ads, and then you need to change ALL the pages to change a single url. This is how we used to do things long time ago, and it sucked BIG TIME, and that's why people invented server-side includes and cgi and mod_php and all of that... it saves time, and your time costs much more than h…
To be fair, static site generators are a thing and are very much underused in cooperations. He could have the same scores/performance and still get the full advantages you mentioned. But yes, handcrafting html is pointless at some point, especially if you have to update the contents every so often
A static site generator requires a toolchain, being platform-aware, updating dependencies, etc. Sometimes I think of these things as labor for a new employee (if you need to onboard a new maintainer) on a new system (if you need to switch hosts or upgrade the disk/OS).
It's probably about 2-4 hours for an experienced developer to figure out how to setup and maintain a static site generator assuming no unexpected problems, then get familiar with the syntax and structure, so hopefully the labor savings from using a static site generator is worth that.