20 ms·

RIP Jekyll (The Genesis of the Jamstack)

131 points by jaredcwhite 5y ago

mfer 5y ago
I wonder if GitHub will step in and maintain. Isn't it still a built-in part of their pages stack? Even if there isn't new feature development, if it's part of their stack they should step in and maintain it. You don't want bitrot to introduce vulnerabilities through unmaintained publicly exposed things in your stack.
- sam1r 5y ago
  Right. They (gh) should creative a relief team that handles repositories with very high stars, and no active maintenance.
  - mfer 5y ago
    I'm not suggesting they do that. GH pages is includes jekyll. It's a feature of their product. I would expect them to maintain that as long as jekyll is part of their feature suite. I'm only bringing them up because it impacts their product directly. https://docs.github.com/en/pages/setting-up-a-github-pages-site-with-jekyll/creating-a-github-pages-site-with-jekyll https://docs.github.com/en/pages/setting-up-a-github-pages-s...
- jaredcwhite 5y ago
  AKAIK, they apply (or backport) security fixes to the Jekyll 3.x branch. No word on if they ever plan to migrate to Jekyll 4 or beyond.
- HomeDeLaPot 5y ago
  I can't say if the article was ninja edited, but it specifically addresses this.
Communitivity 5y ago
I loved Jekyll, and still do. This is a sad state, and I hope both that it improves and Jekyll survives. I switched to Zola for most of my stuff a while back, and while there are still gaps, it does everything I need and is production ready. https://www.getzola.org/ https://www.getzola.org/
- jaredcwhite 5y ago
  Oh interesting, that's a Rust-based SSG. Definitely something nice about a single binary and not needing a full language runtime installed.
  - sleibrock 5y ago
    Absolutely. I started using Zola after writing my own solution, Zola seemed like the next best step up. It has a lot of good, but it also requires a lot of setup to get going. If you don't care about making your own theme, it's easy to get going and start up a new site, but past that, it's very fast to compile files and comes with image transforms for additional resizing needs.
  - cxr 5y ago
    > a single binary Well, one program to generate the site, and then an implicit assumption that you'll use another program (your Web browser) at some point to verify the output. If you're into cutting out prereqs when you can, why not cut out one more?
    - cxr 5y ago
      ...what's offensive about this?
      - cpach 5y ago
        I wasn’t offended (and I didn’t downvote you) but I failed to see the point you made. Feel free to elaborate. I don’t understand why you mentioned the web browser. Don’t we all take for granted that the user will utilize a web browser to access a website? Be it Chrome or Lynx.
        cxr 5y ago
        > Don’t we all take for granted that the user will utilize a web browser to access a website? That is my point. If it is a given that Runtime A is going to be involved, and your angle is to tout the benefit of binary B being to let you to eliminate Runtime C, why even settle for now needing to rely on B? Why wouldn't you try to avoid it as well? Just use A.
Exuma 5y ago
What do people use besides Jekyll?
- moreoutput 5y ago
  https://www.11ty.dev/ https://www.11ty.dev/ I'm doing a non trivial project with eleventy in my free time -- works well.
- bilal4hmed 5y ago
  Ive been using Hugo
- cproctor 5y ago
  I've been using Hugo as well. I used Pelican (Python port of Jekyll) for a long time, but Hugo is so much more performant and has a larger ecosystem at this point. The main downside is that the Hugo documentation is sometimes terse and snarky.
  - firecall 5y ago
    With regards to performance, I used Hugo like 3 or 4 years ago now, and it was insanely fast! Compared to really sluggish build times with Jekyll/Ruby it was incredible! Some sites went from 10s of seconds to what felt like instant build! However, with new versions of Ruby and M1 Macs, I dont notice build lag in Jekyll anymore! And overall, I much preferred Jekyll and the way it structured sites, template and includes! :-)
  - shusaku 5y ago
    I switched my blog from Jekyll to Pelican recently after getting sick of constant ruby package versioning issues. It’s pretty nice, though maybe not as good for getting your site to appear on google search
- Xavdidtheshadow 5y ago
  My work has moved largely from Ruby to JS, so I've been enjoying Gatsby! It's probably overkill for simple sites, but I like how customizable it is.
indigodaddy 5y ago
Will Bridgetown support current Jekyll themes?
- megraf 5y ago
  This is a pretty important question. The themes are the main reason I continue to use Jekyll
- bdcravens 5y ago
  > While Bridgetown has diverged somewhat from Jekyll in terms of architecture and is not source compatible (for example plugins and themes) Based only on what I've heard, but my understanding is it's not a huge undertaking to port over
- jaredcwhite 5y ago
  Only with a few modifications …we're nearly through a stint of addressing tech debt, and then we plan to publish a guide for porting over Jekyll themes out for to make this process much more clear.
eatonphil 5y ago
Personally I don't find static site generators worth the effort to learn or keep up-to-date as versions inevitably come. I end up just writing my own for each site in 1-200 lines of Python. It's normally just a markdown library and a template engine wrapped with a file system walker. Here's an example: https://github.com/eatonphil/notes.eatonphil.com/blob/master/scripts/build.py https://github.com/eatonphil/notes.eatonphil.com/blob/master.... It's longer than usual since it embeds parts of the home page html inside it. These scripts last for years and only change slightly over time. Very low maintenance.
- abricot 5y ago
  You don't find them worth the effort, but you wrote your own?
  - eatonphil 5y ago
    Updated to clarify that it is the time it takes to learn and the upkeep over time that I find not worthwhile.
  - brandonmenc 5y ago
    The popular static site generators all accommodate very large sites. Which is great, but it can them very time consuming to learn if all you want to do is throw up some blog posts. Writing a small static site generator for a personal site can be done in an afternoon, and it's fun.
  - petepete 5y ago
    Nanoc fills this niche quite well. It's more of a SSG toolkit than an SSG. You build a Rules file with steps for each of your file types and it loops through and builds your site. It comes with Markdown out of the box but you can make it do just about anything. https://nanoc.app/ https://nanoc.app/
    - drran 5y ago
      Pandoc + Makefile is enough. https://github.com/ivanstojic/pandoc-ssg/blob/master/Makefile https://github.com/ivanstojic/pandoc-ssg/blob/master/Makefil...
Zababa 5y ago
> Open source in 2021 looks like: > Engagement on Twitter > Official Discord chat room Cherry picked from a list with 4 others elements that I agree with, but the first two are terrible. Twitter is getting more and more closed (you can't see some stuff without being logged in now) and for Discord you have to create an account to see the content. Both are not free software. Reading stuff around free software shouldn't require an account on a proprietary platform.
- jaredcwhite 5y ago
  Well if you want to reach lots of developers, you have to be where they are, and they're on Twitter and Discord—for better or worse. :shrug:
  - cvwright 5y ago
    Mastodon and Matrix instead?
    - dorinlazar 5y ago
      Not for mainstream projects - plus those places tend to become political mudwaters, because freedom in tech has become political the past few years.
      - cvwright 5y ago
        Agreed about Mastodon, unfortunately. But that has not been my experience with Matrix.
    - mdoms 5y ago
      No one is on Mastodon or Matrix.
      - jaredcwhite 5y ago
        I certainly wish people were on Mastodon (haven't tried Matrix yet). I ran a Mastodon instance for some time. The experience was decent but discovery was terrible, and discovery is what makes Twitter (for example) so compelling.
Sodaware 5y ago
I used to use Jekyll. I still do, but I used to, too.
qrush 5y ago
Hi, original Jekyll "core team" (if it could be called that) member here - just wanted to say thanks for writing this up, and I had no idea about the current status of the project or that one of the maintainers recently passed away. That all being said: I think it's ok for OSS projects to "pass on" - and hopefully be replaced by better ones! I wish we had a better way of recognizing this for projects or talking about this industry-wide.
- nirvdrum 5y ago
  Closely related, I wish we had a better way of saying a library or product is now feature-complete. We use recent commit activity as a proxy of viability, but all of that churn could just as easily be an indication of immaturity. It's okay for tools to achieve their objectives and just live on as stable code with maintenance releases as needed. To my mind, Jekyll is feature-complete. The only changes I've needed to make to my Jekyll site are dealing with breakages from backwards-incompatible updates. I've been hosting with GitHub Pages for the past 12 years and I largely don't even have to think about it. It's nice.
  - jaredcwhite 5y ago
    I get what you're saying, and for single-purposes libraries or other simple infrastructure, that totally makes sense. But Jekyll lives in a wider world of vital tools from Gatsby to Eleventy to Hugo to (fill in the blank of your favorite SSG), and if it can no longer serve its main audience relative to compelling alternatives, it's not feature-complete, it's obsolete.
    - nirvdrum 5y ago
      I'd imagine Jekyll's main audience is GitHub Pages and it seems to be used quite widely there. I get what you're saying, but I don't think Jekyll needs to compete with every single site generator on every feature. Gatsby is a case where the whole concept is taken in a wildly different direction and that's fine. I can't use Gatsby the way I use Jekyll and so Gatsby isn't the tool for me. But, Jekyll takes Markdown and turns it into HTML really well and has done so for over a decade. It's really not that complicated a tool. I think there's probably two levels of discussion going on here. In very broad terms and with a generous scope of "we", we largely treat anything written in the last 15 years differently than anything that came before it. I don't know if it's because GitHub makes it so easy to see source or because recent languages have public repositories or something entirely different. But, no one looks at `bzip2` or `dig` and dismisses them as being obsolete because they don't have a hockey stick shape on the commit graph or because they don't serve multiple possible functions. To qrush's point, there has been a recent push to create "modern" implementations of system utilities and so we now have `ripgrep` and `bat` and maybe those new tools will reign supreme. But, I don't think that means `grep` or `cat` are dead and it's fantastic that they've worked reliably and consistently for so long (minus GNU vs BSD differences). So my lament, if you will, is software being declared dead just because activity on it has slowed down (or essentially ceased). I think another way to interpret that data is it's mature and stable. I think it's great that Jekyll is a reasonably stable utility that I can rely upon. I can even install it via `apt` now and not have to deal with the mess of maintaining a Ruby environment. I can push a commit to GitHub and have a high degree of certainty that my site will generate the way I expect and that can match what I see on my own local system. That level of maturity is something I'd like to see more software approach. In my experience, constantly chasing use cases often transforms a tool or library that was great at one thing into a tool that is okay at best at several things. Breaking compatibility is a good way to start annoying your supporters. Maybe Jekyll won't be adopted for greenfield projects and that'll lead to its obsolescence. I just think that's a premature proclamation. It has a massive installation base via GitHub Pages, so stability is likely the better lever to pull.
mdoms 5y ago
I use Jekyll for a static site and I guess I just don't really understand why it needs further development. I haven't upgraded my version of Jekyll since I think 2017 because it does what it says on the tin. Sometimes it's ok for software to be "done".
- zetalyrae 5y ago
  The stability is precisely what I like about Jekyll. I can come back to a website I haven't touched in years and update it and it works. It's so rare for software to work like that. The latest version of GNU sed is almost two years old. Does that mean it's time to ditch it for the latest rewritten-in-Rust tool du jour? Of course not. Infrastructural software such as Jekyll should be finishable.
- __turbobrew__ 5y ago
  My thoughts are the same. Jekyll “just works” for me, why does it need further development?
  - jaredcwhite 5y ago
    Yet Jekyll just doesn't work for lots of other people. That's why vital software dependencies always need further development…because over time they properly service a smaller and smaller subset of users—unless we're talking about an extremely specific single-use library of some fashion. That's not what Jekyll is!
    - __turbobrew__ 5y ago
      People should use something else if Jekyll doesn’t fulfill their use case. Jekyll does what it is supposed to do very well. It is refreshing in the software world to have tools which are not always changing from under you.
xupybd 5y ago
Frank didn't look like he was at the age where people pass in their sleep. This reminds me to be thankful for every day I get.
ctoth 5y ago
Pretty sure that open source in 2021 means releasing the code somewhere public under an Open Source license, just like it did in 2011 and 2001. Not sure where all these other requirements come from. I'm already giving you free software, I don't also need to build a community.
- Lammy 5y ago
  > Not sure where all these other requirements come from. They come from people who want to make money more than they want to build a nice thing and share it. Gotta spread that Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt to usurp Jekyll's userbase.
Lammy 5y ago
The thing I love about Jekyll and other SSGs is being able to build my site into a bunch of static files and put every single one of those files on my own server, on IPFS, or even just for offline viewing, so there's no need to leak requests to the Cloudflares/Amazons/Googles of the world. Meanwhile "the Jamstack" seems to be the exact opposite of that, a privacy nightmare all about gluing together micro-APIs that I have to keep paying for forever. I could wake up one day and find that my """static""" site is suddenly missing all its images because Cloudinary is having an outage or whatever. Why would I want to subject my readers to this, much less myself?
- cutler 5y ago
  Because we live in an age in which DIY/solo development isn't respected anymore. Devs today think nothing of filling-up 500Mb with node modules just to generate a static site. I've even seen SSG's in Docker images.
juanvqz 5y ago
Oh I remember when in my town we used middlemanapp to build our ruby community http://oaxacarb.org/ http://oaxacarb.org/ jamstack still growing up
ThinkBeat 5y ago
I dont often say this on the internet but WFT? I am autistic. I love coding. A single person can create wonderful software that is a gift to everyone as open source. I hate trying to be an extrovert and engage with a lot of people. I hate twitter and discord Does that mean that I and people like me cannot do open source in 2021? Most of these seem like detriments more than anything. * Engagement on Twitter * Official Discord chat room * Public roadmap * Predictable release cycles * Welcoming community involvement in shaping new features and tackling technical debt * Cultivating working relationships with wider ecosystems (in this case Ruby, Jamstack, etc.)
- kthejoker2 5y ago
  The very next sentence in the article: > Lack of any one of these points isn’t the end of the world, but at the present moment, Jekyll lacks ALL of them. That’s a real problem. Nobody cares if there's no Discord if you're releasing and responsive to Github issues / roadmap questions.
  - tapland 5y ago
    The list with Discord is an example of what "open source in 2021" as opposed to being responsive to github. So yes, some care.
- akerl_ 5y ago
  I think there’s a terminology gap that the article doesn’t do a great job with. Open source in 2021 does not require anything on the list. But to be a widely deployed open source project does generally require those kinds of things. As the parallel commenter noted, it doesn’t need to specifically be Discord or GitHub or Twitter or whatever, but to have mass adoption, the project needs to have directionality and momentum. Even if that’s “we feel we’re feature complete, if you find bugs, report them here”. Without that, plenty of things are still “open source”, but users can’t really pick them up for their projects because they can’t rely on them. That’s fine: there’s plenty of really fascinating and meaningful projects out there that can’t be relied on for the long term. But for something like Jekyll, if I’m looking for a platform for my blog, I’d be remiss to pick something that’s stuck in the state it’s in. That’s the issue that the author seems to be pushing at: he forked Jekyll because Jekyll is a widely adopted codebase that’s no longer able to support its niche, and he’s hoping that Bridgetown can fill that niche for users.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
woodruffw 5y ago
Am I missing something, or is Jekyll still receiving fairly active contributions[1]? Even by that (misleading) metric, it doesn't seem to be dead. Expecting maintainers to tilt at the newest windmill instead of actually maintain is a critical part of why so many in the open source community burn out. [1]: https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/commits/master https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/commits/master
- jspaetzel 5y ago
  Maybe this is just clickbait? Jekyll is in a fine state for an extremely mature project. It would be extremely souring to me if Jekyll decided to add webpack and other javascript dependencies with a newer version. One of the things I like about Jekyll is that it's a STATIC site generator that doesn't try to do everything. Some sites I want to be dead simple, and that's what you get with Jekyll. If I want more complexity I'd go with a more complex generator like Hugo or Gatsby.
  - woodruffw 5y ago
    > Jekyll is in a fine state for an extremely mature project. That's my impression as well, as an outsider. A recurring nightmare of mine as a maintainer is that I'll wake up one day and read someone's blog proclaiming the death of one of my projects, when all I've done is stopped adding new features to it. Especially so when it's someone who's made a living for themselves as a downstream user. And I'm in the same boat as you: I've had a Jekyll-based blog, without incident, for a little bit under a decade now. It's only gotten faster and easier to use over time, which is more than I even asked for.
    - jaredcwhite 5y ago
      I never declared the death of the project. Frank, the remaining release maintainer of Jekyll after Parker Moore left, declared it. Read the article. :)
      - Lammy 5y ago
voltagex_ 5y ago
The messages being inaccessible due to Slack archiving should be a much bigger deal IMO.
jdauriemma 5y ago
Jekyll's commit history suggests the "RIP" title is, shall we say, exaggerated. https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/commits/master https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/commits/master
- mooreds 5y ago
  Thank you! I don't doubt Jekyll is mature, but there's a difference between mature and abandoned. It looks like at least two different folks are committing, which gives me hope that this project (which we use quite heavily at $DAYJOB) is mature.
  - jdauriemma 5y ago
    I love Jekyll. I haven't upgraded it in years because I simply haven't had to. It does the job and that's the highest praise I can give a piece of software.
fermentation 5y ago
One of the things that I like most about Jekyll is that when I return to my blog's repo that I haven't visited in 7 months, it is very easy for me to figure out how to "revive" it and add more content. I spent a few months making the "ultimate" Gatsby site for my blog. I loved it. A year went by and I had no desire to relearn everything in order to update the thing (and fix the myriad of security vulns GitHub was now warning me about).
- inside65 5y ago
  Can you share a link? Would like to see.
bradgessler 5y ago
I was using Middleman for a while, but then grew tired of all the dependencies I had to always keep up-to-date. I did the completely illogical thing and built my own static site generator, https://sitepress.cc/ https://sitepress.cc/ A few years later and I ended up deleting most of it and replacing the internals with Rails. Now Sitepress is just a tiny rails application sitting on top of a bunch of files. Most of the maintenance and dependencies are handled by major Rails lib maintainers. If you’ve grown use to Rails helpers, they’re all there. When you deploy it, you can compile it into static files and deploy as you’d expect, but you can also deploy it as a rails or rack app … or even embed it into an existing rails app. When Rails 7.0 gets released I’ll drop JS importmaps into the default install for free and have my dream static site generator that doesn’t have a huge asset compilation step.
sandGorgon 5y ago
Really sad to hear this. I hope GitHub Pages supports an alternative JS-based SSG framework. Nextjs and Gatsby are good candidates here and most likely will plug into Github's existing asset framework.
joelbluminator 5y ago
Sounds like Frank grew tired of the project a bit and was happy to just let it be since it's mostly feature complete. Should have probably looked for a new maintainer, I'm pretty sure lots of people would have been happy to take it. And now Frank has passed away; the remaining core members (are there any?) should look for new heirs.
Enthouan 5y ago
Less than 2 weeks after Frank passed away. Not very classy.
Tomte 5y ago
An important aspect: most of the "new stuff" that Jekyll might need down the road will either be done the plugin level by the community (integration for some new social network), or by libraries that Jekyll uses (new image formats). I don't see why Jekyll Core would need an urgent release.
blazespitfire 5y ago
Seems like the author just wants Jekyll to be dead to promote whatever he is promoting.
- jaredcwhite 5y ago
  Ah, I can see you have not yet read the article. :)
ddtaylor 5y ago
I use Hugo now instead of Jekyll because the out of the box install directions on stock Ubuntu don't seem to work anymore for Jekyll. Maybe that's a Ruby problem, but either way, it required fiddling and I didn't want to do it anymore.
bridgeidiot 5y ago
What a ridiculous tone and attitude by the author. Who's this bridgetown loser?
- jaredcwhite 5y ago
  I don't know, did you read the article? :)
schipplock 5y ago
> Those concerns led me to fork Jekyll and create Bridgetown. Please, Jared, contribute to Jekyll instead. There are many contributors, and you will probably get better code reviews. Bridgetown is your one-person show where you contribute the most commits (https://github.com/bridgetownrb/bridgetown/graphs/contributors https://github.com/bridgetownrb/bridgetown/graphs/contributo...). Who is reviewing your changes? :) YOU can revive Jekyll :)! I would like that. No offence, but Bridgetown is probably on "hiatus" sooner or later as well. I, as a user, have no trust in these forks.
- jaredcwhite 5y ago
  Been there. Done that! https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/issues/8085 https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/issues/8085 This was before I had the slightest inkling of ever attempting anything like a fork. :) And I'm truly thankful for all the people who are placing their trust in the long-term health of Bridgetown as warranted by the extremely active and robust 16-month commit and release history so far.
  - schipplock 5y ago
    Hi Jared, that issue was an exciting read. Thanks for the link. I get why you started a fork. The thumbs-up in your last comment tells a story (https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/issues/8085#issuecomment-606739396 https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/issues/8085#issuecomment-60...) :) (spoiler: the thumbs-up is from DirtyF).
sneak 5y ago
Jekyll is already feature complete. I haven't updated my jekyll build container in years. (I update the site it builds often.) What is this "dead" nonsense? It isn't a story, it's a tool, and it's complete. By that logic my framing hammer is "dead" now, too. "No more updates" isn't always a bad thing.
- jaredcwhite 5y ago
  Plenty of people are not asking for Jekyll to be feature complete. It's fallen woefully behind relative to its competition. As for the "dead" nonsense and where that's actually coming from, did you read the article? :)
chmaynard 5y ago
As I understand it, Bridgetown is a Jekyll fork or clone. The author tried and failed to sell his bag of tricks to the Jekyll core team so he decided to go his own way. That's fine, but this article is a blatant attempt to slander Jekyll, sow FUD among its users, and attract attention to his own product. I find this disgusting and reprehensible.
malthejorgensen 5y ago
The argument made here is like “RIP C” now come over to my new project: “C++”. Nope. Nope, nope, nope. Neither C nor Jekyll are dead.
jaredcwhite 5y ago
*Update I've posted to the top of the article:* There’s been a fair amount of internet consternation since I published this article. While I do stand by everything in the post factually-speaking, I apologize for the insensitive timing of this article—coming so soon after Frank’s passing. I’m genuinely sorry this came across as a “Jared vs. Frank” debacle. Should I have waited a few more weeks or months? Probably. Perhaps it was originally a mistake for me to refrain from publicly commenting on the statements regarding Jekyll’s “permanent hiatus” back in May. It’s hard to say. At the very least, I hope we can all agree that Jekyll’s legacy as the “first among many” of modern static site generators is meaningful to a lot of people, even if we sometimes disagree on the best way to honor that legacy and push Ruby on the Jamstack forward. If the one thing that comes out of all this is that more people step forward to share their positive experiences with Jekyll, Ruby, and building websites, that’s a good thing.
- chmaynard 5y ago
  In my view, your best course of action now would be to apologize, retract your article, and start mending fences.

131 points by jaredcwhite 5y ago

mfer 5y ago

I wonder if GitHub will step in and maintain. Isn't it still a built-in part of their pages stack? Even if there isn't new feature development, if it's part of their stack they should step in and maintain it. You don't want bitrot to introduce vulnerabilities through unmaintained publicly exposed things in your stack.

sam1r 5y ago
Right. They (gh) should creative a relief team that handles repositories with very high stars, and no active maintenance.
- mfer 5y ago
  I'm not suggesting they do that. GH pages is includes jekyll. It's a feature of their product. I would expect them to maintain that as long as jekyll is part of their feature suite. I'm only bringing them up because it impacts their product directly. https://docs.github.com/en/pages/setting-up-a-github-pages-site-with-jekyll/creating-a-github-pages-site-with-jekyll https://docs.github.com/en/pages/setting-up-a-github-pages-s...
jaredcwhite 5y ago
AKAIK, they apply (or backport) security fixes to the Jekyll 3.x branch. No word on if they ever plan to migrate to Jekyll 4 or beyond.
HomeDeLaPot 5y ago
I can't say if the article was ninja edited, but it specifically addresses this.

Communitivity 5y ago

I loved Jekyll, and still do. This is a sad state, and I hope both that it improves and Jekyll survives. I switched to Zola for most of my stuff a while back, and while there are still gaps, it does everything I need and is production ready. https://www.getzola.org/ https://www.getzola.org/

jaredcwhite 5y ago
Oh interesting, that's a Rust-based SSG. Definitely something nice about a single binary and not needing a full language runtime installed.
- sleibrock 5y ago
  Absolutely. I started using Zola after writing my own solution, Zola seemed like the next best step up. It has a lot of good, but it also requires a lot of setup to get going. If you don't care about making your own theme, it's easy to get going and start up a new site, but past that, it's very fast to compile files and comes with image transforms for additional resizing needs.
- cxr 5y ago
  > a single binary Well, one program to generate the site, and then an implicit assumption that you'll use another program (your Web browser) at some point to verify the output. If you're into cutting out prereqs when you can, why not cut out one more?
  - cxr 5y ago
    ...what's offensive about this?
    - cpach 5y ago
      I wasn’t offended (and I didn’t downvote you) but I failed to see the point you made. Feel free to elaborate. I don’t understand why you mentioned the web browser. Don’t we all take for granted that the user will utilize a web browser to access a website? Be it Chrome or Lynx.
      - cxr 5y ago
        > Don’t we all take for granted that the user will utilize a web browser to access a website? That is my point. If it is a given that Runtime A is going to be involved, and your angle is to tout the benefit of binary B being to let you to eliminate Runtime C, why even settle for now needing to rely on B? Why wouldn't you try to avoid it as well? Just use A.

Exuma 5y ago

What do people use besides Jekyll?

moreoutput 5y ago
https://www.11ty.dev/ https://www.11ty.dev/ I'm doing a non trivial project with eleventy in my free time -- works well.
bilal4hmed 5y ago
Ive been using Hugo
cproctor 5y ago
I've been using Hugo as well. I used Pelican (Python port of Jekyll) for a long time, but Hugo is so much more performant and has a larger ecosystem at this point. The main downside is that the Hugo documentation is sometimes terse and snarky.
- firecall 5y ago
  With regards to performance, I used Hugo like 3 or 4 years ago now, and it was insanely fast! Compared to really sluggish build times with Jekyll/Ruby it was incredible! Some sites went from 10s of seconds to what felt like instant build! However, with new versions of Ruby and M1 Macs, I dont notice build lag in Jekyll anymore! And overall, I much preferred Jekyll and the way it structured sites, template and includes! :-)
- shusaku 5y ago
  I switched my blog from Jekyll to Pelican recently after getting sick of constant ruby package versioning issues. It’s pretty nice, though maybe not as good for getting your site to appear on google search
Xavdidtheshadow 5y ago
My work has moved largely from Ruby to JS, so I've been enjoying Gatsby! It's probably overkill for simple sites, but I like how customizable it is.

indigodaddy 5y ago

Will Bridgetown support current Jekyll themes?

megraf 5y ago
This is a pretty important question. The themes are the main reason I continue to use Jekyll
bdcravens 5y ago
> While Bridgetown has diverged somewhat from Jekyll in terms of architecture and is not source compatible (for example plugins and themes) Based only on what I've heard, but my understanding is it's not a huge undertaking to port over
jaredcwhite 5y ago
Only with a few modifications …we're nearly through a stint of addressing tech debt, and then we plan to publish a guide for porting over Jekyll themes out for to make this process much more clear.

eatonphil 5y ago

Personally I don't find static site generators worth the effort to learn or keep up-to-date as versions inevitably come. I end up just writing my own for each site in 1-200 lines of Python. It's normally just a markdown library and a template engine wrapped with a file system walker. Here's an example: https://github.com/eatonphil/notes.eatonphil.com/blob/master/scripts/build.py https://github.com/eatonphil/notes.eatonphil.com/blob/master.... It's longer than usual since it embeds parts of the home page html inside it. These scripts last for years and only change slightly over time. Very low maintenance.

abricot 5y ago
You don't find them worth the effort, but you wrote your own?
- eatonphil 5y ago
  Updated to clarify that it is the time it takes to learn and the upkeep over time that I find not worthwhile.
- brandonmenc 5y ago
  The popular static site generators all accommodate very large sites. Which is great, but it can them very time consuming to learn if all you want to do is throw up some blog posts. Writing a small static site generator for a personal site can be done in an afternoon, and it's fun.
- petepete 5y ago
  Nanoc fills this niche quite well. It's more of a SSG toolkit than an SSG. You build a Rules file with steps for each of your file types and it loops through and builds your site. It comes with Markdown out of the box but you can make it do just about anything. https://nanoc.app/ https://nanoc.app/
  - drran 5y ago
    Pandoc + Makefile is enough. https://github.com/ivanstojic/pandoc-ssg/blob/master/Makefile https://github.com/ivanstojic/pandoc-ssg/blob/master/Makefil...

Zababa 5y ago

> Open source in 2021 looks like: > Engagement on Twitter > Official Discord chat room Cherry picked from a list with 4 others elements that I agree with, but the first two are terrible. Twitter is getting more and more closed (you can't see some stuff without being logged in now) and for Discord you have to create an account to see the content. Both are not free software. Reading stuff around free software shouldn't require an account on a proprietary platform.

jaredcwhite 5y ago
Well if you want to reach lots of developers, you have to be where they are, and they're on Twitter and Discord—for better or worse. :shrug:
- cvwright 5y ago
  Mastodon and Matrix instead?
  - dorinlazar 5y ago
    Not for mainstream projects - plus those places tend to become political mudwaters, because freedom in tech has become political the past few years.
    - cvwright 5y ago
      Agreed about Mastodon, unfortunately. But that has not been my experience with Matrix.
  - mdoms 5y ago
    No one is on Mastodon or Matrix.
    - jaredcwhite 5y ago
      I certainly wish people were on Mastodon (haven't tried Matrix yet). I ran a Mastodon instance for some time. The experience was decent but discovery was terrible, and discovery is what makes Twitter (for example) so compelling.

Sodaware 5y ago

I used to use Jekyll. I still do, but I used to, too.

qrush 5y ago

Hi, original Jekyll "core team" (if it could be called that) member here - just wanted to say thanks for writing this up, and I had no idea about the current status of the project or that one of the maintainers recently passed away. That all being said: I think it's ok for OSS projects to "pass on" - and hopefully be replaced by better ones! I wish we had a better way of recognizing this for projects or talking about this industry-wide.

nirvdrum 5y ago
Closely related, I wish we had a better way of saying a library or product is now feature-complete. We use recent commit activity as a proxy of viability, but all of that churn could just as easily be an indication of immaturity. It's okay for tools to achieve their objectives and just live on as stable code with maintenance releases as needed. To my mind, Jekyll is feature-complete. The only changes I've needed to make to my Jekyll site are dealing with breakages from backwards-incompatible updates. I've been hosting with GitHub Pages for the past 12 years and I largely don't even have to think about it. It's nice.
- jaredcwhite 5y ago
  I get what you're saying, and for single-purposes libraries or other simple infrastructure, that totally makes sense. But Jekyll lives in a wider world of vital tools from Gatsby to Eleventy to Hugo to (fill in the blank of your favorite SSG), and if it can no longer serve its main audience relative to compelling alternatives, it's not feature-complete, it's obsolete.
  - nirvdrum 5y ago
    I'd imagine Jekyll's main audience is GitHub Pages and it seems to be used quite widely there. I get what you're saying, but I don't think Jekyll needs to compete with every single site generator on every feature. Gatsby is a case where the whole concept is taken in a wildly different direction and that's fine. I can't use Gatsby the way I use Jekyll and so Gatsby isn't the tool for me. But, Jekyll takes Markdown and turns it into HTML really well and has done so for over a decade. It's really not that complicated a tool. I think there's probably two levels of discussion going on here. In very broad terms and with a generous scope of "we", we largely treat anything written in the last 15 years differently than anything that came before it. I don't know if it's because GitHub makes it so easy to see source or because recent languages have public repositories or something entirely different. But, no one looks at `bzip2` or `dig` and dismisses them as being obsolete because they don't have a hockey stick shape on the commit graph or because they don't serve multiple possible functions. To qrush's point, there has been a recent push to create "modern" implementations of system utilities and so we now have `ripgrep` and `bat` and maybe those new tools will reign supreme. But, I don't think that means `grep` or `cat` are dead and it's fantastic that they've worked reliably and consistently for so long (minus GNU vs BSD differences). So my lament, if you will, is software being declared dead just because activity on it has slowed down (or essentially ceased). I think another way to interpret that data is it's mature and stable. I think it's great that Jekyll is a reasonably stable utility that I can rely upon. I can even install it via `apt` now and not have to deal with the mess of maintaining a Ruby environment. I can push a commit to GitHub and have a high degree of certainty that my site will generate the way I expect and that can match what I see on my own local system. That level of maturity is something I'd like to see more software approach. In my experience, constantly chasing use cases often transforms a tool or library that was great at one thing into a tool that is okay at best at several things. Breaking compatibility is a good way to start annoying your supporters. Maybe Jekyll won't be adopted for greenfield projects and that'll lead to its obsolescence. I just think that's a premature proclamation. It has a massive installation base via GitHub Pages, so stability is likely the better lever to pull.

mdoms 5y ago

I use Jekyll for a static site and I guess I just don't really understand why it needs further development. I haven't upgraded my version of Jekyll since I think 2017 because it does what it says on the tin. Sometimes it's ok for software to be "done".

zetalyrae 5y ago
The stability is precisely what I like about Jekyll. I can come back to a website I haven't touched in years and update it and it works. It's so rare for software to work like that. The latest version of GNU sed is almost two years old. Does that mean it's time to ditch it for the latest rewritten-in-Rust tool du jour? Of course not. Infrastructural software such as Jekyll should be finishable.
__turbobrew__ 5y ago
My thoughts are the same. Jekyll “just works” for me, why does it need further development?
- jaredcwhite 5y ago
  Yet Jekyll just doesn't work for lots of other people. That's why vital software dependencies always need further development…because over time they properly service a smaller and smaller subset of users—unless we're talking about an extremely specific single-use library of some fashion. That's not what Jekyll is!
  - __turbobrew__ 5y ago
    People should use something else if Jekyll doesn’t fulfill their use case. Jekyll does what it is supposed to do very well. It is refreshing in the software world to have tools which are not always changing from under you.

xupybd 5y ago

Frank didn't look like he was at the age where people pass in their sleep. This reminds me to be thankful for every day I get.

ctoth 5y ago

Pretty sure that open source in 2021 means releasing the code somewhere public under an Open Source license, just like it did in 2011 and 2001. Not sure where all these other requirements come from. I'm already giving you free software, I don't also need to build a community.

Lammy 5y ago
> Not sure where all these other requirements come from. They come from people who want to make money more than they want to build a nice thing and share it. Gotta spread that Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt to usurp Jekyll's userbase.

Lammy 5y ago

The thing I love about Jekyll and other SSGs is being able to build my site into a bunch of static files and put every single one of those files on my own server, on IPFS, or even just for offline viewing, so there's no need to leak requests to the Cloudflares/Amazons/Googles of the world. Meanwhile "the Jamstack" seems to be the exact opposite of that, a privacy nightmare all about gluing together micro-APIs that I have to keep paying for forever. I could wake up one day and find that my """static""" site is suddenly missing all its images because Cloudinary is having an outage or whatever. Why would I want to subject my readers to this, much less myself?

cutler 5y ago
Because we live in an age in which DIY/solo development isn't respected anymore. Devs today think nothing of filling-up 500Mb with node modules just to generate a static site. I've even seen SSG's in Docker images.

juanvqz 5y ago

Oh I remember when in my town we used middlemanapp to build our ruby community http://oaxacarb.org/ http://oaxacarb.org/ jamstack still growing up

ThinkBeat 5y ago

I dont often say this on the internet but WFT? I am autistic. I love coding. A single person can create wonderful software that is a gift to everyone as open source. I hate trying to be an extrovert and engage with a lot of people. I hate twitter and discord Does that mean that I and people like me cannot do open source in 2021? Most of these seem like detriments more than anything. * Engagement on Twitter * Official Discord chat room * Public roadmap * Predictable release cycles * Welcoming community involvement in shaping new features and tackling technical debt * Cultivating working relationships with wider ecosystems (in this case Ruby, Jamstack, etc.)

kthejoker2 5y ago
The very next sentence in the article: > Lack of any one of these points isn’t the end of the world, but at the present moment, Jekyll lacks ALL of them. That’s a real problem. Nobody cares if there's no Discord if you're releasing and responsive to Github issues / roadmap questions.
- tapland 5y ago
  The list with Discord is an example of what "open source in 2021" as opposed to being responsive to github. So yes, some care.
akerl_ 5y ago
I think there’s a terminology gap that the article doesn’t do a great job with. Open source in 2021 does not require anything on the list. But to be a widely deployed open source project does generally require those kinds of things. As the parallel commenter noted, it doesn’t need to specifically be Discord or GitHub or Twitter or whatever, but to have mass adoption, the project needs to have directionality and momentum. Even if that’s “we feel we’re feature complete, if you find bugs, report them here”. Without that, plenty of things are still “open source”, but users can’t really pick them up for their projects because they can’t rely on them. That’s fine: there’s plenty of really fascinating and meaningful projects out there that can’t be relied on for the long term. But for something like Jekyll, if I’m looking for a platform for my blog, I’d be remiss to pick something that’s stuck in the state it’s in. That’s the issue that the author seems to be pushing at: he forked Jekyll because Jekyll is a widely adopted codebase that’s no longer able to support its niche, and he’s hoping that Bridgetown can fill that niche for users.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

woodruffw 5y ago

Am I missing something, or is Jekyll still receiving fairly active contributions[1]? Even by that (misleading) metric, it doesn't seem to be dead. Expecting maintainers to tilt at the newest windmill instead of actually maintain is a critical part of why so many in the open source community burn out. [1]: https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/commits/master https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/commits/master

jspaetzel 5y ago
Maybe this is just clickbait? Jekyll is in a fine state for an extremely mature project. It would be extremely souring to me if Jekyll decided to add webpack and other javascript dependencies with a newer version. One of the things I like about Jekyll is that it's a STATIC site generator that doesn't try to do everything. Some sites I want to be dead simple, and that's what you get with Jekyll. If I want more complexity I'd go with a more complex generator like Hugo or Gatsby.
- woodruffw 5y ago
  > Jekyll is in a fine state for an extremely mature project. That's my impression as well, as an outsider. A recurring nightmare of mine as a maintainer is that I'll wake up one day and read someone's blog proclaiming the death of one of my projects, when all I've done is stopped adding new features to it. Especially so when it's someone who's made a living for themselves as a downstream user. And I'm in the same boat as you: I've had a Jekyll-based blog, without incident, for a little bit under a decade now. It's only gotten faster and easier to use over time, which is more than I even asked for.
  - jaredcwhite 5y ago
    I never declared the death of the project. Frank, the remaining release maintainer of Jekyll after Parker Moore left, declared it. Read the article. :)
    - Lammy 5y ago

voltagex_ 5y ago

The messages being inaccessible due to Slack archiving should be a much bigger deal IMO.

jdauriemma 5y ago

Jekyll's commit history suggests the "RIP" title is, shall we say, exaggerated. https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/commits/master https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/commits/master

mooreds 5y ago
Thank you! I don't doubt Jekyll is mature, but there's a difference between mature and abandoned. It looks like at least two different folks are committing, which gives me hope that this project (which we use quite heavily at $DAYJOB) is mature.
- jdauriemma 5y ago
  I love Jekyll. I haven't upgraded it in years because I simply haven't had to. It does the job and that's the highest praise I can give a piece of software.

fermentation 5y ago

One of the things that I like most about Jekyll is that when I return to my blog's repo that I haven't visited in 7 months, it is very easy for me to figure out how to "revive" it and add more content. I spent a few months making the "ultimate" Gatsby site for my blog. I loved it. A year went by and I had no desire to relearn everything in order to update the thing (and fix the myriad of security vulns GitHub was now warning me about).

inside65 5y ago
Can you share a link? Would like to see.

bradgessler 5y ago

I was using Middleman for a while, but then grew tired of all the dependencies I had to always keep up-to-date. I did the completely illogical thing and built my own static site generator, https://sitepress.cc/ https://sitepress.cc/ A few years later and I ended up deleting most of it and replacing the internals with Rails. Now Sitepress is just a tiny rails application sitting on top of a bunch of files. Most of the maintenance and dependencies are handled by major Rails lib maintainers. If you’ve grown use to Rails helpers, they’re all there. When you deploy it, you can compile it into static files and deploy as you’d expect, but you can also deploy it as a rails or rack app … or even embed it into an existing rails app. When Rails 7.0 gets released I’ll drop JS importmaps into the default install for free and have my dream static site generator that doesn’t have a huge asset compilation step.

sandGorgon 5y ago

Really sad to hear this. I hope GitHub Pages supports an alternative JS-based SSG framework. Nextjs and Gatsby are good candidates here and most likely will plug into Github's existing asset framework.

joelbluminator 5y ago

Sounds like Frank grew tired of the project a bit and was happy to just let it be since it's mostly feature complete. Should have probably looked for a new maintainer, I'm pretty sure lots of people would have been happy to take it. And now Frank has passed away; the remaining core members (are there any?) should look for new heirs.

Enthouan 5y ago

Less than 2 weeks after Frank passed away. Not very classy.

Tomte 5y ago

An important aspect: most of the "new stuff" that Jekyll might need down the road will either be done the plugin level by the community (integration for some new social network), or by libraries that Jekyll uses (new image formats). I don't see why Jekyll Core would need an urgent release.

blazespitfire 5y ago

Seems like the author just wants Jekyll to be dead to promote whatever he is promoting.

jaredcwhite 5y ago
Ah, I can see you have not yet read the article. :)

ddtaylor 5y ago

I use Hugo now instead of Jekyll because the out of the box install directions on stock Ubuntu don't seem to work anymore for Jekyll. Maybe that's a Ruby problem, but either way, it required fiddling and I didn't want to do it anymore.

bridgeidiot 5y ago

What a ridiculous tone and attitude by the author. Who's this bridgetown loser?

jaredcwhite 5y ago
I don't know, did you read the article? :)

schipplock 5y ago

> Those concerns led me to fork Jekyll and create Bridgetown. Please, Jared, contribute to Jekyll instead. There are many contributors, and you will probably get better code reviews. Bridgetown is your one-person show where you contribute the most commits (https://github.com/bridgetownrb/bridgetown/graphs/contributors https://github.com/bridgetownrb/bridgetown/graphs/contributo...). Who is reviewing your changes? :) YOU can revive Jekyll :)! I would like that. No offence, but Bridgetown is probably on "hiatus" sooner or later as well. I, as a user, have no trust in these forks.

jaredcwhite 5y ago
Been there. Done that! https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/issues/8085 https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/issues/8085 This was before I had the slightest inkling of ever attempting anything like a fork. :) And I'm truly thankful for all the people who are placing their trust in the long-term health of Bridgetown as warranted by the extremely active and robust 16-month commit and release history so far.
- schipplock 5y ago
  Hi Jared, that issue was an exciting read. Thanks for the link. I get why you started a fork. The thumbs-up in your last comment tells a story (https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/issues/8085#issuecomment-606739396 https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/issues/8085#issuecomment-60...) :) (spoiler: the thumbs-up is from DirtyF).

sneak 5y ago

Jekyll is already feature complete. I haven't updated my jekyll build container in years. (I update the site it builds often.) What is this "dead" nonsense? It isn't a story, it's a tool, and it's complete. By that logic my framing hammer is "dead" now, too. "No more updates" isn't always a bad thing.

jaredcwhite 5y ago
Plenty of people are not asking for Jekyll to be feature complete. It's fallen woefully behind relative to its competition. As for the "dead" nonsense and where that's actually coming from, did you read the article? :)

chmaynard 5y ago

As I understand it, Bridgetown is a Jekyll fork or clone. The author tried and failed to sell his bag of tricks to the Jekyll core team so he decided to go his own way. That's fine, but this article is a blatant attempt to slander Jekyll, sow FUD among its users, and attract attention to his own product. I find this disgusting and reprehensible.

malthejorgensen 5y ago

The argument made here is like “RIP C” now come over to my new project: “C++”. Nope. Nope, nope, nope. Neither C nor Jekyll are dead.

jaredcwhite 5y ago

*Update I've posted to the top of the article:* There’s been a fair amount of internet consternation since I published this article. While I do stand by everything in the post factually-speaking, I apologize for the insensitive timing of this article—coming so soon after Frank’s passing. I’m genuinely sorry this came across as a “Jared vs. Frank” debacle. Should I have waited a few more weeks or months? Probably. Perhaps it was originally a mistake for me to refrain from publicly commenting on the statements regarding Jekyll’s “permanent hiatus” back in May. It’s hard to say. At the very least, I hope we can all agree that Jekyll’s legacy as the “first among many” of modern static site generators is meaningful to a lot of people, even if we sometimes disagree on the best way to honor that legacy and push Ruby on the Jamstack forward. If the one thing that comes out of all this is that more people step forward to share their positive experiences with Jekyll, Ruby, and building websites, that’s a good thing.

chmaynard 5y ago
In my view, your best course of action now would be to apologize, retract your article, and start mending fences.