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The linked blog post was a good read about why the author went down this path, goals of the project, and some technical challenges along the way: https://czep.n

The linked blog post was a good read about why the author went down this path, goals of the project, and some technical challenges along the way: https://czep.net/20/stasis.html https://czep.net/20/stasis.html As someone with a Jekyll blog who's considered changing SSG's a few times in the past, this was interesting to read. I could see myself going down a similar path. Gatsby adds a lot of complexity that IMO isn't a big benefit for a simple blog, and when I tried migrating my site to it, a lot of existing posts were broken in weird ways. Eleventy is "Jekyll but in JavaScript" and way closer to what I want, but its flavor of Liquid is just slightly different from Jekyll's to the point where I would have to update a bunch of posts, plus there's no incremental build yet. So I'm still sticking with Jekyll for now. Maybe one day I'll break down and build my own SSG like the author...

johnchristopher 6y ago
> Eleventy is "Jekyll but in JavaScript" and way closer to what I want, but its flavor of Liquid is just slightly different from Jekyll's to the point where I would have to update a bunch of posts, plus there's no incremental build yet. So much for > bamboleo 3 days ago [–] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25561177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25561177 > You can’t be serious. Jekyll blogs are pure text files you can download and view in a thousand ways. Good luck extracting sensible data from WordPress’ database without losing metadata. Unless SSG get a common metadata and/or post format I don't think migration is as smooth as some say it is. In the XML days we had ATOM. I don't know if we have any JSON/MD things like that ?
- ratww 6y ago
  The posts on those are just Markdown, and most of them use the same metadata format. For Atom/RSS you can use a plugin in Jekyll or 11ty. It's really not that complicated...
  - johnchristopher 6y ago
    I believe you are missing my point. I am not talking about syndication, I am talking about a reliable standard post/content format that would guarantee interoperability and plug and playability between static CMS. Without tweaking.
    - ratww 6y ago
      I did understand, maybe you misunderstood me. I answered your question by saying that the current format (Markdown+Metadata) is the one used by lots of popular Static CMSs. I wrote one to migrate away from Jekyll and it was just a matter of copying the files. There's absolutely nothing more to it, it's just files. I answered about ATOM/RSS because it might be useful if you want to migrate to something that supports importing using ATOM. Of course, there's also templates, Wordpress also has zero compatibility or ability to export templates or reuse them somewhere, so I don't think it applies.
- dceddia 6y ago
  Heh, they are indeed pure text files, but then again so is XML :D My Jekyll posts are mostly Markdown with some YAML frontmatter, but some have a few "include" statements here and there that use Liquid. The frontmatter stuff is easy enough to transform with some `sed` commands or whatever. The bigger problem is the surrounding stuff that relies more on Liquid, like email signup forms, the list of posts, the list of tags, etc. All the little things that would need a small bit of work to reformat to work with another tool, it all adds up. And there were some oddities with how the two parsers handled newlines around Liquid, so sometimes Eleventy's output would be jumbled together when Jekyll's looks fine.
  - johnchristopher 6y ago
    There's a quote about reinventing xml ^^. 15 years ago I wrote a very rudimentary static blog using only ATOM documents and some XSL. Maybe it's time to revisit the idea. > The bigger problem is the surrounding stuff that relies more on Liquid, like email signup forms, the list of posts, the list of tags, etc. All the little things that would need a small bit of work to reformat to work with another tool, it all adds up. Yeah, but then it's not really content (posts) so I think it's okay. This doesn't need to be as portable.
nickjj 6y ago
> So I'm still sticking with Jekyll for now. This is where I'm at too. I've been using Jekyll to manage a few sites (some with 300+ posts and 100+ drafts). It's really not bad with incremental builds. It's about a 3 second turn around to see live reloads while writing. It's definitely not perfect, but I still haven't found anything that comes close.
- dceddia 6y ago
  Yeah, the incremental builds are pretty good. I even turned on LiveReload and it's ok-ish. It's not super snappy but it mostly works. If I move to something else I want the ability to include proper components on the page, whether React or Svelte or something. I'd love to find the sweet spot where I can embed interactive examples without having to "program my blog" like Gatsby. Elder.js looks interesting, but probably more complex than what I need. And anyway, every time I start considering this path, I being to wonder whether rewriting my blog is really the best use of my time...
hanniabu 6y ago
Have you looked into Hugo?
- dceddia 6y ago
  I have! I love the speed aspect of it, but I'm less keen on the template language. I'd have to rework a lot of Liquid stuff that I've built up over time, then it looks like it'd be very hard to port out of Hugo down the road because as far as I know, that language is pretty specific to Hugo. Hugo also seems to be more or less "take it or leave it" in terms of customizability, and I don't know Go. I've got a custom syntax highlighting setup that uses JS, which I imagine would be hard to integrate. (it was annoying to integrate into Jekyll too!)

johnchristopher 6y ago

> Eleventy is "Jekyll but in JavaScript" and way closer to what I want, but its flavor of Liquid is just slightly different from Jekyll's to the point where I would have to update a bunch of posts, plus there's no incremental build yet. So much for > bamboleo 3 days ago [–] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25561177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25561177 > You can’t be serious. Jekyll blogs are pure text files you can download and view in a thousand ways. Good luck extracting sensible data from WordPress’ database without losing metadata. Unless SSG get a common metadata and/or post format I don't think migration is as smooth as some say it is. In the XML days we had ATOM. I don't know if we have any JSON/MD things like that ?

ratww 6y ago
The posts on those are just Markdown, and most of them use the same metadata format. For Atom/RSS you can use a plugin in Jekyll or 11ty. It's really not that complicated...
- johnchristopher 6y ago
  I believe you are missing my point. I am not talking about syndication, I am talking about a reliable standard post/content format that would guarantee interoperability and plug and playability between static CMS. Without tweaking.
  - ratww 6y ago
    I did understand, maybe you misunderstood me. I answered your question by saying that the current format (Markdown+Metadata) is the one used by lots of popular Static CMSs. I wrote one to migrate away from Jekyll and it was just a matter of copying the files. There's absolutely nothing more to it, it's just files. I answered about ATOM/RSS because it might be useful if you want to migrate to something that supports importing using ATOM. Of course, there's also templates, Wordpress also has zero compatibility or ability to export templates or reuse them somewhere, so I don't think it applies.
dceddia 6y ago
Heh, they are indeed pure text files, but then again so is XML :D My Jekyll posts are mostly Markdown with some YAML frontmatter, but some have a few "include" statements here and there that use Liquid. The frontmatter stuff is easy enough to transform with some `sed` commands or whatever. The bigger problem is the surrounding stuff that relies more on Liquid, like email signup forms, the list of posts, the list of tags, etc. All the little things that would need a small bit of work to reformat to work with another tool, it all adds up. And there were some oddities with how the two parsers handled newlines around Liquid, so sometimes Eleventy's output would be jumbled together when Jekyll's looks fine.
- johnchristopher 6y ago
  There's a quote about reinventing xml ^^. 15 years ago I wrote a very rudimentary static blog using only ATOM documents and some XSL. Maybe it's time to revisit the idea. > The bigger problem is the surrounding stuff that relies more on Liquid, like email signup forms, the list of posts, the list of tags, etc. All the little things that would need a small bit of work to reformat to work with another tool, it all adds up. Yeah, but then it's not really content (posts) so I think it's okay. This doesn't need to be as portable.

nickjj 6y ago

> So I'm still sticking with Jekyll for now. This is where I'm at too. I've been using Jekyll to manage a few sites (some with 300+ posts and 100+ drafts). It's really not bad with incremental builds. It's about a 3 second turn around to see live reloads while writing. It's definitely not perfect, but I still haven't found anything that comes close.

dceddia 6y ago
Yeah, the incremental builds are pretty good. I even turned on LiveReload and it's ok-ish. It's not super snappy but it mostly works. If I move to something else I want the ability to include proper components on the page, whether React or Svelte or something. I'd love to find the sweet spot where I can embed interactive examples without having to "program my blog" like Gatsby. Elder.js looks interesting, but probably more complex than what I need. And anyway, every time I start considering this path, I being to wonder whether rewriting my blog is really the best use of my time...

hanniabu 6y ago

Have you looked into Hugo?

dceddia 6y ago
I have! I love the speed aspect of it, but I'm less keen on the template language. I'd have to rework a lot of Liquid stuff that I've built up over time, then it looks like it'd be very hard to port out of Hugo down the road because as far as I know, that language is pretty specific to Hugo. Hugo also seems to be more or less "take it or leave it" in terms of customizability, and I don't know Go. I've got a custom syntax highlighting setup that uses JS, which I imagine would be hard to integrate. (it was annoying to integrate into Jekyll too!)