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One of the problems with text files and the philosophy of chaining little tools together to do something is that what usually happens is a rube gold-berg machin

One of the problems with text files and the philosophy of chaining little tools together to do something is that what usually happens is a rube gold-berg machine of little dependencies you have to manage to keep things working. I could spend time working out how Jekyll works, writing a script to deploy the changes and managing changes with git. Alternatively I could just spin up a wordpress instance on a VPS in minutes and start publishing content. Sometimes the "unix" way isn't the simplest way. Sometimes having a product that already built for that task that is paid for is simpler and a better use of your time. I like git, markdown files and pandoc for docs and might even use hugo for really simple sites and use some bash / powershell / batch scripts. However if you work with anyone than yourself you will have to document how it works otherwise they will most likely be clueless as to what you have done. Even in dev circles. Most "dark matter" developers are reluctant of using a command line and only learn what they need to learn to get by. Many just do everything in the IDE and are completely lost outside it.

bodge5000 5y ago
I do agree with the author, that you should use the simplest tools you can get away with, but (text-files + jekyll + this + that) isnt just text files, as you say its a precarious stack no less complex than some software package or whatever. I guess if you do just want the truly simplest tool for a website, html is probably better than text files, even if it is a bit less ergonomic to write with
- YEwSdObPQT 5y ago
  > I do agree with the author, that you should use the simplest tools you can get away with, but (text-files + jekyll + this + that) isnt just text files, as you say its a precarious stack no less complex than some software package or whatever. They are advocating for sellotaping tools together to build a workflow near the end of the article. > I guess if you do just want the truly simplest tool for a website, html is probably better than text files, even if it is a bit less ergonomic to write with Writing HTML when you are trying to write content is pretty painful. Way back in the distant past I used to charge about £100 a HTML page. I ended up learning Perl (and later PHP) so I wouldn't have to write HTML.
  - deleted 5y ago
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bodge5000 5y ago

I do agree with the author, that you should use the simplest tools you can get away with, but (text-files + jekyll + this + that) isnt just text files, as you say its a precarious stack no less complex than some software package or whatever. I guess if you do just want the truly simplest tool for a website, html is probably better than text files, even if it is a bit less ergonomic to write with

YEwSdObPQT 5y ago
> I do agree with the author, that you should use the simplest tools you can get away with, but (text-files + jekyll + this + that) isnt just text files, as you say its a precarious stack no less complex than some software package or whatever. They are advocating for sellotaping tools together to build a workflow near the end of the article. > I guess if you do just want the truly simplest tool for a website, html is probably better than text files, even if it is a bit less ergonomic to write with Writing HTML when you are trying to write content is pretty painful. Way back in the distant past I used to charge about £100 a HTML page. I ended up learning Perl (and later PHP) so I wouldn't have to write HTML.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]