6 ms·

Show HN: Clayoven – a minimalist website generator for math, code, and articles

149 points by artagnon 7y ago

parfamz 7y ago
I was excited. But why ruby? Other tools are also ruby. I don't have appetite to hack in ruby projects.
- alwillis 7y ago
  Why not Ruby? It’s a perfectly fine language.
  - ColinWright 7y ago
    (Was this intended to be a reply to the comment by parfamz[0]?) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21794929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21794929
    - dang 7y ago
      Probably. I moved the comment to that parent.
- xwowsersx 7y ago
  So don't hack in Ruby. Presumably, it isn't the goal of the author of this project to cater to your liking.
- madhadron 7y ago
  I dislike Ruby and have written about my issues with the language at length, but this is rarely a productive discussion to have. People work with whatever language they have to hand unless they are explicitly setting out to learn a new one. Almost certainly seven years ago the author was using Ruby as a central tool of their work and when they started a project just did it in whatever was in this toolbox at the moment.
rodw 7y ago
> It has been built at a glacial pace, over a period of seven years, as my website expanded in content. Three cheers for slow software. Thoughtful solutions are under-appreciated. I'm surprised how many junior devs I need to convince that the fact that programs like vi, emacs, make and TeX are 40+ years old is a _good_ thing.
- friendlybus 7y ago
  I agree with thoughtful solutions being under-appreciated, but you can't correlate age with quality or goodness.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Of course you can. The question is, whether the correlation is strong or weak, and what sign it has. I'd argue the correlation is positive and somewhat strong, for the following reasons: - Survivorship effect (not really bias in this context): old software that survived and is still used to this day survived for the reason. Old legacy systems in companies may survive because they're too expensive to replace, but old end-user software survived because it is good. Often, it's better than any new software - vi(m), Emacs and TeX all are - and so they kind of suck the oxygen out of the room (why build a new, better vim, when real vim can be made better faster?). - The times of vi(m), Emacs and TeX were much saner. It was because web apps were the dominant mode of building end-user software, it was before SaaS was the dominant business model - and both of those incentivize bad software that's disrespectful of user's cognitive and computational resources (not to mention privacy). People cared more about end-user ergonomics than developer team velocity. People cared about performance, because it was a difference between a working and not-working application. Today's software doesn't care, because bad performance only means the user can't run more than few applications simultaneously, and that's not any individual vendor's problem. So yeah, I find it to be a good heuristic that old end-user software that's still in use is going to be better than new software, if you're willing to overlook some idiosyncrasies of the past.
    - friendlybus 7y ago
rangerranvir 7y ago
Not sure if you guys have heard about mathjax.js. Used to be a good one back in the days, when I used it. https://ranvir.xyz/mathjaxprogram.html https://ranvir.xyz/mathjaxprogram.html https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax
- Jaxan 7y ago
  A good alternative is KaTeX. That one doesn’t require JavaScript.
  - capableweb 7y ago
    Are you talking about https://github.com/KaTeX/KaTeX https://github.com/KaTeX/KaTeX ? In that case, that seems to be a JS project/library, so not sure how it could _not_ require JS.
    - detaro 7y ago
      It does not require JS on the client.
  - artagnon 7y ago
    Unfortunately, KaTeX can't do commutative diagrams, while MathJaX has an xypic.js extension, which can.
akho 7y ago
I do not understand the point in these static site generators. To me, the attractiveness of having a static website is that you get to choose the presentation appropriate to the particular content of each page. You can also automate some of the work in making those pages — generate a particular folder or preprocess some of the htmls — but static site generators seem to insist on running the whole thing. If you are happy with a blog + a couple of similarly-formatted static pages, why not Wordpress? Also: ‘minimalist’ generator with its own made-up markup format.
- stoolpigeon 7y ago
  I used to run 5 wordpress sites on shared hosting. For a number of reasons I decided to move to a vps. It had basic resources but nothing special as I wasn't doing anything special. They were all very low traffic sites. But even with that, mariadb kept crashing due to running out of ram. As I was investigating what was going on I also started to realize the huge amount of traffic aimed at my sites just trying to compromise them. I took some steps to secure them but I still kept having issues. I've transitioned all but one to static sites. Wordpress really didn't bring anything I needed that I don't get with Hugo. With my static sites I don't come close to the resource issues I had. Things are much more secure, there's nothing to "hack". My workflow is simple and I really like it. I edit my posts locally in Atom. I push changes to my git repository and then build the site and use rsync to push those changes to the host. It works great. So that's the point for me. Much more resource efficient, more secure, gives me what I need without losing anything. Another option I haven't used but I think could make sense in some situations is using wordpress as a static site generator.
  - akho 7y ago
    MovableType, from what I remember, defaults to generating static pages. It’s proprietary these days, though. wget -r on a wordpress site probably takes a bit too long? I don’t know. Anyway, the task solved by static generators is trivial, so we get a trillion non-supported github repos all building the same kind of site (basically a Wordpress site), badly. Moving from one to another without breaking links is hard. Wordpress at least will not go away at a random moment.
majkinetor 7y ago
I use something similar but aimed for the documentation on projects I work on. Its a bundle of mkdocs, plantuml, matjax etc. available in docker container. https://github.com/majkinetor/mm-docs-template https://github.com/majkinetor/mm-docs-template

149 points by artagnon 7y ago

parfamz 7y ago

I was excited. But why ruby? Other tools are also ruby. I don't have appetite to hack in ruby projects.

alwillis 7y ago
Why not Ruby? It’s a perfectly fine language.
- ColinWright 7y ago
  (Was this intended to be a reply to the comment by parfamz[0]?) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21794929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21794929
  - dang 7y ago
    Probably. I moved the comment to that parent.
xwowsersx 7y ago
So don't hack in Ruby. Presumably, it isn't the goal of the author of this project to cater to your liking.
madhadron 7y ago
I dislike Ruby and have written about my issues with the language at length, but this is rarely a productive discussion to have. People work with whatever language they have to hand unless they are explicitly setting out to learn a new one. Almost certainly seven years ago the author was using Ruby as a central tool of their work and when they started a project just did it in whatever was in this toolbox at the moment.

rodw 7y ago

> It has been built at a glacial pace, over a period of seven years, as my website expanded in content. Three cheers for slow software. Thoughtful solutions are under-appreciated. I'm surprised how many junior devs I need to convince that the fact that programs like vi, emacs, make and TeX are 40+ years old is a _good_ thing.

friendlybus 7y ago
I agree with thoughtful solutions being under-appreciated, but you can't correlate age with quality or goodness.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Of course you can. The question is, whether the correlation is strong or weak, and what sign it has. I'd argue the correlation is positive and somewhat strong, for the following reasons: - Survivorship effect (not really bias in this context): old software that survived and is still used to this day survived for the reason. Old legacy systems in companies may survive because they're too expensive to replace, but old end-user software survived because it is good. Often, it's better than any new software - vi(m), Emacs and TeX all are - and so they kind of suck the oxygen out of the room (why build a new, better vim, when real vim can be made better faster?). - The times of vi(m), Emacs and TeX were much saner. It was because web apps were the dominant mode of building end-user software, it was before SaaS was the dominant business model - and both of those incentivize bad software that's disrespectful of user's cognitive and computational resources (not to mention privacy). People cared more about end-user ergonomics than developer team velocity. People cared about performance, because it was a difference between a working and not-working application. Today's software doesn't care, because bad performance only means the user can't run more than few applications simultaneously, and that's not any individual vendor's problem. So yeah, I find it to be a good heuristic that old end-user software that's still in use is going to be better than new software, if you're willing to overlook some idiosyncrasies of the past.
  - friendlybus 7y ago

rangerranvir 7y ago

Not sure if you guys have heard about mathjax.js. Used to be a good one back in the days, when I used it. https://ranvir.xyz/mathjaxprogram.html https://ranvir.xyz/mathjaxprogram.html https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax

Jaxan 7y ago
A good alternative is KaTeX. That one doesn’t require JavaScript.
- capableweb 7y ago
  Are you talking about https://github.com/KaTeX/KaTeX https://github.com/KaTeX/KaTeX ? In that case, that seems to be a JS project/library, so not sure how it could _not_ require JS.
  - detaro 7y ago
    It does not require JS on the client.
- artagnon 7y ago
  Unfortunately, KaTeX can't do commutative diagrams, while MathJaX has an xypic.js extension, which can.

akho 7y ago

I do not understand the point in these static site generators. To me, the attractiveness of having a static website is that you get to choose the presentation appropriate to the particular content of each page. You can also automate some of the work in making those pages — generate a particular folder or preprocess some of the htmls — but static site generators seem to insist on running the whole thing. If you are happy with a blog + a couple of similarly-formatted static pages, why not Wordpress? Also: ‘minimalist’ generator with its own made-up markup format.

stoolpigeon 7y ago
I used to run 5 wordpress sites on shared hosting. For a number of reasons I decided to move to a vps. It had basic resources but nothing special as I wasn't doing anything special. They were all very low traffic sites. But even with that, mariadb kept crashing due to running out of ram. As I was investigating what was going on I also started to realize the huge amount of traffic aimed at my sites just trying to compromise them. I took some steps to secure them but I still kept having issues. I've transitioned all but one to static sites. Wordpress really didn't bring anything I needed that I don't get with Hugo. With my static sites I don't come close to the resource issues I had. Things are much more secure, there's nothing to "hack". My workflow is simple and I really like it. I edit my posts locally in Atom. I push changes to my git repository and then build the site and use rsync to push those changes to the host. It works great. So that's the point for me. Much more resource efficient, more secure, gives me what I need without losing anything. Another option I haven't used but I think could make sense in some situations is using wordpress as a static site generator.
- akho 7y ago
  MovableType, from what I remember, defaults to generating static pages. It’s proprietary these days, though. wget -r on a wordpress site probably takes a bit too long? I don’t know. Anyway, the task solved by static generators is trivial, so we get a trillion non-supported github repos all building the same kind of site (basically a Wordpress site), badly. Moving from one to another without breaking links is hard. Wordpress at least will not go away at a random moment.

majkinetor 7y ago

I use something similar but aimed for the documentation on projects I work on. Its a bundle of mkdocs, plantuml, matjax etc. available in docker container. https://github.com/majkinetor/mm-docs-template https://github.com/majkinetor/mm-docs-template