[HN Gopher] RIP Jekyll (The Genesis of the Jamstack)
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RIP Jekyll (The Genesis of the Jamstack)
Author : jaredcwhite
Score : 28 points
Date : 2021-09-13 17:15 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bridgetownrb.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bridgetownrb.com)
| juanvqz wrote:
| Oh I remember when in my town we used middlemanapp to build our
| ruby community http://oaxacarb.org/ jamstack still growing up
| Zababa wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Mastodon and Matrix instead?
| Zababa wrote:
| Elixir and OCaml mostly use a forum and it works well.
| Everyone can read it, it's easy to post on it, it's easy to
| moderate it, and it's great when you want to search for
| things. I don't think microblogging and instant messaging
| are what an open source community needs.
| dorinlazar wrote:
| Not for mainstream projects - plus those places tend to
| become political mudwaters, because freedom in tech has
| become political the past few years.
| cvwright wrote:
| Agreed about Mastodon, unfortunately.
|
| But that has not been my experience with Matrix.
| mdoms wrote:
| No one is on Mastodon or Matrix.
| jaredcwhite wrote:
| 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.
| Zababa wrote:
| Sure, but hiding public discussions about your open source
| project behind a Discord server is a really bad idea. The
| goal of these things is to also act as a public repository
| for knowledge, and by using Discord you fail at that part.
| qwertox wrote:
| Mailing lists are not bad, as well as the issue tracker on
| GitHub.
| kevwil wrote:
| Yeah, I almost choked on my lunch when I read that. In addition
| to your well-said reasons, it just seems icky. In my not-so-
| humble opinion, Twitter (among others) has become a harmful
| echo chamber of dangerous ideas and hypocrisy. Requiring the
| use of Twitter is not a good signal to send.
| dorinlazar wrote:
| The Discord chat room is very little different from the (RIP)
| freenode channel. Sure, you need to create an account, but
| that's where communities are built nowadays - in closed groups
| that can be controlled, moderated properly, and automated,
| while still being a fun and friendly environment to chat in. It
| does that well.
|
| Github is not open. All the things listed there are costly, in
| one way or another. There's nothing free about anything that
| makes up open source today. Open source became corporate some
| time in the late 00s. And while I don't agree with the author
| (including the fact that he calls the new product Ruby-powered,
| not Impaired by Ruby), I do agree with that strange assessment
| that open source communities work that way.
| Zababa wrote:
| You can read Github without creating an account. You can't do
| that with Discord and it's becoming harder with Twitter.
| Discourse forums can be read without an account too. I agree
| that we should be careful of Github too.
| jgwil2 wrote:
| Don't disagree but tbf he also said:
|
| > 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.
|
| I think the point is that most projects will engage with the
| public in at least _some_ of these ways.
| Zababa wrote:
| That's true, but I don't see how Jekyll would be improved
| with a Twitter and a Discord.
| dwheeler wrote:
| > Engagement on Twitter
|
| > Official Discord chat room
|
| No. Not at all. Many very popular OSS projects don't use
| Twitter or Discord. Any time you say "all OSS projects use
| technology X", be it GitHub or Twitter or whatever, the only
| thing you can be _sure_ of is that the statement is wrong.
| _Some_ projects may, sure, but that 's different.
|
| Probably the only "technology" you can say they generally use
| is a web page.
|
| It _is_ reasonable to say "they have 1 or more ways to
| interact, and that's clearly identified on their web page". But
| assuming that everyone uses the same communication mechanism is
| demonstrably false.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Communitivity wrote:
| 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/
| jaredcwhite wrote:
| Oh interesting, that's a Rust-based SSG. Definitely something
| nice about a single binary and not needing a full language
| runtime installed.
| sleibrock wrote:
| 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.
| CarVac wrote:
| I use Zola for my project website. As someone who had never
| built a website before, I tried several static site builders
| but only really succeeded in getting a tweakable theme working
| with Zola.
| Sodaware wrote:
| I used to use Jekyll. I still do, but I used to, too.
| qrush wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| skrtskrt wrote:
| Even if the core project is feature complete and excellent,
| "death" can come from a lack of continued creation and
| maintenance of 3rd party integrations or plugins.
|
| Personally I found Jekyll plugins lacking and those that were
| good seemed pretty old/unmaintained.
|
| However I only moved to Hugo from Jekyll just because I
| didn't want to deal with Ruby gem installation and dependency
| management. I am not a Ruby dev by any means, I have enough
| dependency management misery from being a Python dev.
|
| Hugo installation is just a brew-installed or Go-installed
| CLI tool I never have to think about dependencies of, thanks
| to how great the Golang packaging/distribution situation is.
| nirvdrum wrote:
| That's fair. Having to set up a Ruby installation to run a
| utility just isn't fun. Especially when the expectation is
| that you don't use the system-provided Ruby. You're
| supposed to go use a Ruby version manager and set all of
| that up. And that rough experience can contribute to its
| death, for sure. I just don't think "has few commits in the
| last month" is a great reason to declare a project as dead,
| especially one providing the backbone of GitHub Pages.
| mfer wrote:
| 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.
| jaredcwhite wrote:
| 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.
| sam1r wrote:
| Right. They (gh) should creative a relief team that handles
| repositories with very high stars, and no active maintenance.
| mfer wrote:
| 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-s...
| ctoth wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| Exuma wrote:
| What do people use besides Jekyll?
| schwartzworld wrote:
| I use Pandoc and a few lines of nodeJS code.
| cyberge99 wrote:
| I use hexo. It's node and not super popular, but it does what I
| need and I've built my workflows around it so alost everything
| is done by cli (bash, imagemagick and hexo).
|
| It can be seen here:
|
| https://chrisbergeron.com
| Xavdidtheshadow wrote:
| 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.
| jaredcwhite wrote:
| For React-based projects, I would advocate for Next.js...but
| yeah, unless you _know_ you need React for very specific
| reasons, it 's definitely overkill. =)
| bilal4hmed wrote:
| Ive been using Hugo
| skrtskrt wrote:
| Hugo. I did find creating my own theme to be a bit of PITA due
| to the lack of documentation but once I got over that hump it's
| smooth sailing.
| cproctor wrote:
| 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.
| moreoutput wrote:
| https://www.11ty.dev/
|
| I'm doing a non trivial project with eleventy in my free time
| -- works well.
| Lammy wrote:
| 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?
| mdoms wrote:
| 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".
| xupybd wrote:
| 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.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Will Bridgetown support current Jekyll themes?
| jaredcwhite wrote:
| 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.
| megraf wrote:
| This is a pretty important question. The themes are the main
| reason I continue to use Jekyll
| bdcravens wrote:
| > 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
| eatonphil wrote:
| 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....
| 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 wrote:
| You don't find them worth the effort, but you wrote your own?
| eatonphil wrote:
| Updated to clarify that it is the time it takes to learn and
| the upkeep over time that I find not worthwhile.
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