5 ms·

I can see why this article with a very basic premise is so popular. * It's short, so the average reader here has enough attention span for it. * It's obvious,

I can see why this article with a very basic premise is so popular. * It's short, so the average reader here has enough attention span for it. * It's obvious, so that leaves plenty of room for patting oneself on the back. * It's simple, so one can reference their own writings about a similar topic or related to it in some way. * It's about a topic that lets the commenter here show off their own website and bloviate about themselves. This is nothing against the author, but against Hacker News and how so much interesting material fails to ever reach the front page.

sequoia 7y ago
Agreed: I struggle to understand why this is considered a useful post to a broad audience of people who all already know what a static site generator is. I will offer one critique of the article itself: the repeated (often many times within one sentence) self referential linking is tedious and makes reading difficult. Am I supposed to read 4 different articles before I get to the end of one sentence in this one, or is this just some SEO voodoo?
davesmith1983 7y ago
This post reads of "Why are people liking what I don't like?". This article might be stating the obvious to you. However sometimes people have to be reminded that things can be done simply without the nonsense of cloud hosting, CDNs, automated deployments and all the guff that comes with it. This sort of article is pertinent in the days of many of the large tech sites being censorious (there was a discussion with 100s of comments about youtube censoring infosec channels), sites with megabytes of JavaScript and even many CSS libraries / frameworks requiring a build tools for styling. Reminding people that it doesn't have to be this way is important and it doesn't need your approval.
buboard 7y ago
* it s timely, because a lot of things are censored lately * it’s something that a lot of people agree on, but it is NOT happening, so it s not obvious

sequoia 7y ago

Agreed: I struggle to understand why this is considered a useful post to a broad audience of people who all already know what a static site generator is. I will offer one critique of the article itself: the repeated (often many times within one sentence) self referential linking is tedious and makes reading difficult. Am I supposed to read 4 different articles before I get to the end of one sentence in this one, or is this just some SEO voodoo?

davesmith1983 7y ago

This post reads of "Why are people liking what I don't like?". This article might be stating the obvious to you. However sometimes people have to be reminded that things can be done simply without the nonsense of cloud hosting, CDNs, automated deployments and all the guff that comes with it. This sort of article is pertinent in the days of many of the large tech sites being censorious (there was a discussion with 100s of comments about youtube censoring infosec channels), sites with megabytes of JavaScript and even many CSS libraries / frameworks requiring a build tools for styling. Reminding people that it doesn't have to be this way is important and it doesn't need your approval.

buboard 7y ago

* it s timely, because a lot of things are censored lately * it’s something that a lot of people agree on, but it is NOT happening, so it s not obvious