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If the author wants to write HTML directly, sure. But, uh, kinda feels like the author's "reasons" aren't balanced in terms of comparing "maintaining a website
by rgoulter 7y ago
If the author wants to write HTML directly, sure.
But, uh, kinda feels like the author's "reasons" aren't balanced in terms of comparing "maintaining a website by writing HTML directly" to "maintaining a website by using a static-site generator".
e.g.:
"But how can I then keep the style and layout of all my posts and pages in sync?"
Simple: don’t! It’s more fun that way. Look at this website:
if you read any previous blog post, you’ll notice that
they have a different stylesheet. This is because they were written at different times.
As such, they’re like time capsules.
...But if someone wanted to maintain/update consistent styles across a website with only HTML files, then this would be a point in favour of a templating system over writing in HTML directly.
Finally, you constantly have to work around the limitations of your static site generator.
Let's say you want your site to have a specific directory structure,
where pages are sorted under various categories.
With Jekyll, this is practically impossible,
and even though you technically can get it working if you really try,
it is only through much effort and with a source code that is
organized much more unintuitively than if you just wrote it directly in HTML.
While it's fair to say that you have to learn the idiosyncracies of a SSG to use it,
I'm not sure this is a fair criticism of Jekyll.
Seems that page output is determined by a 'permalink' key.
https://jekyllrb.com/docs/permalinks/ https://jekyllrb.com/docs/permalinks/
(Found through a quick search for "jekyll structure").
- rossdavidh 7y agoI agree that some sites have a reason for wanting to keep the look of all pages in sync, I think it's fair to point out (because most people won't think of it), that this isn't really all that important for a basic blog. You don't really need all your posts to look identical. There are some things, like what url the home page links to, that need to be kept in sync everywhere, but that isn't hard to do.
- john-aj 7y agoIt absolutely is a fair criticism of Jekyll, because I have experience with it. I want it to work without having to manually set some key – I want my posts put in specific subdirectories by ... actually putting them in specific subdirectories. Which is impossible with Jekyll.