11ty is my favourite site builder. Hugo is better in terms of dev support / build speed / opinionated simplicity - and I've also used Hugo several times - but quite often I've run into a wall where Hugo isn't flexible enough to let me do things the way I want. 11ty lets you do (almost) whatever the hell you please.
I'm sad to hear that the "OG 11ty era" has ended. But, as others have noted, fortunately 11ty will live on, so long as folks keep using it and hacking away at it.
Many folks on HN are the exact sorts of people who have lived the thankless popular-enough-to-be-an-unpaid-job solo OSS maintainer dream, so I wonder if you feel as annoyed by the tone of this post as I do.
I truly don't understand how the same folks that champion accessibility and humane ideals while humble bragging about working for $5/hour to help get local businesses online can throw so much shade on people who are urgently trying to figure out a way to get paid, often just to keep the projects that they created alive so that these people can continue to use them for free.
I don't know if it's entitlement, projection or just wanting to have it both ways, but I wish they would channel their frustrations into helping to find a sustainable model for OSS creators to make a living wage to keep the magic coming instead of being shitty about people doing their best to find a forever home before their burnout finally kicks in.
Why do you think it’s the same folks? People tend to be louder when they don’t agree with something, and many topics will divide a community mostly in half. The end result is that you will more than likely hear complaints and subtle digs/insults no matter what happens.
The ultimate entitlement is refusing to pay for tooling, while expecting to be getting a paid job as well.
I am hard line on not feeling sorry for projects going away, being taken over by organisations, when it mattered people should have actually sponsored them, instead of bosting how great is to get it all for free/gratis.
Every, single time, someone posts a cool paid project, there is the usual comment why pay, look at MIT/BSD/Apache/... project so and so.
That is true, but nowadays most paid projects end up being perpetual subscriptions. Which I kind of get, as on-going maintenance still costs, but it used to be that you paid for a tool once and only paid again if you wanted/needed an updated version. I'd gladly pay $15-$60 for a tool once (and again if I needed an update) but $10-$15 per month for 20 different things (that I will only use occasionally) is just out of reach for me financially and I live in a "rich" first-world country.
I'm not so sure. If they can't pay for a one-time purchase, they won't be able to afford a subscription. Subscriptions are always more expensive in the end, that's why they exist in the first place.
Idk if it's fair to characterise someone helping build a "community-driven directory to help people discover and connect with grassroots organizations, clubs, activist groups, and community initiatives" as "working for $5/hour to help get local businesses online". It's akin to complaining that pro-bono work devalues the profession of law.
It feels like there is entitlement on both sides. People who do OSS work feel entitled to financial benefits, despite explicitly choosing to give their work away for free. And people who consume open source software feel entitled to unpaid labor in perpetuity. It kind of sucks on both ends.
Rich Hickey wrote an essay titled "Open Source is Not About You" [0], where he states "As a user of something open source you are not thereby entitled to anything at all. You are not entitled to contribute. You are not entitled to features. You are not entitled to the attention of others. You are not entitled to having value attached to your complaints. You are not entitled to this explanation."
This is true. Unequivocally. What is also true is that OSS is also not about the contributors. They aren't owed anything by the consumers. They aren't entitled to any compensation, and they aren't entitled to others putting effort into making their contributions sustainable, helping them make a living wage, or alleviating burnout. We're all adults here, we can stop working on something if it's causing us pain or suffering. And we can freely fork a project if it's going in a direction we don't agree. That is the nature of open source. It's just a licensing model, which only exists because of certain laws. Otherwise, it's just a decision on what is public and private. Nothing more.
So if a project isn't going in the direction you want? Shut up and fork it. Not getting paid for your work? Find a way to monetise it or move on. Don't whine about either of these things on the internet.
I've been using the same version of Jekyll, using the same outdated, discontinued version of ruby, for more than 10y. I refuse to learn anything about ruby, or spend any time upgrading Jekyll or any of the 2 plug-ins I use, and I take a weird pride in that. It works, it generates my blog, I don't want it to do anything else. I have no idea how it works anymore. For all I know Jekyll has been abandoned. That version of ruby might be riddled with bugs and security holes, and why would I care? it's only used when I generate the website, in a docker container that doesn't talk to anything.
Eleventy might not receive new features, your website will still work.
The thing about SSGs is that you only need a small percentage of the functionality they offer and for what: so instead of some simple syntax for links you can remember in HTML
<a href="there">description</a>
there is something weird and irregular I always have to look up in the manual in Markdown and all sorts of other Markdown WTFs. Every time I tried to get started on a personal site with an SSG I would get depressed looking at hundreds of ugly themes, get depressed with the mysterious and crappy cloud-side build systems, get depressed with the prospect of customizing them, etc. So I'd start experimenting, never finish and come back six months to make another attempt that fails.
When I really needed a landing page that looked like it fell off a UFO I did it in Vite-React (such a joy to use semantic components, like write
<Event date="2026-04-18">Earth Day Parade Ithaca Commons</Event>
and it is a simple python script that uploads the dist files to S3 (no "WTF went wrong with the github action") invalidates Cloudfront [1], extracts metadata, maintains the metadata database. There's a clear path to extending the system to do exactly what I want to do in the future unlike some SSG which I will have to relearn from scratch in six months when I want to make a big change... and had it up and running and in front of end users in a weekend.
That is, SSG has no commercial potential because any individual or organization which is capable of maintaining and customizing an SSG can create one from scratch that does exactly what they need with less cost and effort and success is only possible through hypnotizing people into thinking otherwise -- in many fields of software this happens every day but I think not SSG, like those people are going to stay asleep and dream of Drupal and Wordpress.
[1] ... and if I want to move to some similar platform I just implement it instead of struggle with "plugins" and "modules" and other overcomplicated extension mechanisms
https://soupault.net/ is about using plain HTML, but doing index pages, RSS feeds and so on from that. You even get away with not having frontmatter, because CSS like selectors allow those meta pages to retrieve title, date etc. from the HTML pages.
As a learning exercise, I wrote my own little SSG in ocaml, and man I forgot how nice a language it is. Tooling is still a bit rough but lots better than it used to be
You can use 11ty with plain HTML pages/posts, I believe. [1] And it doesn’t handle deployment at all. What you get is the same dist/ directory that your Python script would happily upload to S3.
This was the beauty of 11ty. It just puts together HTML files from templates, and maybe handles sitemap and RSS if you need. That will probably change now.
This. The 11ty sites that I've built (all personal sites that will only ever be edited by me) are all plain HTML, no markdown. 11ty is lovely and bare-bones and un-opinionated.
A frontend-agnostic static site generator doesn't have an "end". You can keep using the final version for years to come. You can maintain a private fork to fix bugs or compatibility issues with newer versions of the language. And if you don't feel like maintaining it, you can migrate content to a different SSG. Or indeed, you can write your own SSG, it's a fun project.
It's somewhat counterintuitive, but the added complexity leads to simpler projects that are easier to maintain long term. I have simple markdown files, and a separate, code-based conversion process that works well for me.
Also the documentation for eleventy was always confusing to me. I almost got the impression that "it's so simple, we don't have to explain it". Whereas astro's documentation is much more accesible; there were a handful of cases where there was something I wanted to do and astro had an example of exactly that. I didn't have to do guesswork, just follow the examples in the way the creators intended. Stuff like that is important.
Astro is great, and easily extensible just by looking at the code and existing extensions too. Highly recommend it. Having the islands of actual react stuff is incredibly useful as well.
Astro is great, and is what I prefer on new “static-y” projects (for more dynamic stuff, SvelteKit).
But 11ty really was so much simpler if all you need is to put together some templates, and don’t want to deal with component stuff. That said, the docs really are lacking in some parts.
I've been using Hugo for some of these reasons for the last 6+ years. The project seems to chug along. They've updated the documentation now and everything is super good there.
And I can choose whether or not to use NPM. I've thought of moving from it a few times. But it's just better and solid.
But the other side to this coin is us having problem making money. It's muddy waters for sure. For example, Manjaro Linux was dragged through the mud after they started their company. Not to mention, On the other hand, just like SSG's like Hugo and 11ty, Netlify and Vercel and others are responsible for a ton of free sites (like mine). They need to not just eat, they should be able make a luxurious life if that's what they want.
I am not against anyone trying to make money off of their OSS projects. We need good companies to make money. I just hope it doesn't become anti-consumers. Which is what the OP's concern is. Can't blame him for thinking this as well.
SSGs versus Wordpress is surprisingly still a battle… I’m genuinely shocked at the number of sites on the Net that use Wordpress, dynamically assembling markup with PHP for every page view, risking constant hacking and stuff, when they have a total of like 7 or 100 pages, which could all be pre-rendered to HTML files in roughly 8 seconds on even a junky laptop or X-small ec2 instance. It really is okay.
For those who post regular updates on those sites, there are great and cheap WP plugins that export the whole site as static to something like FTP or S3, so you can just firewall the actual WP behind an IP restriction and host the actual public-facing site from S3/whatever.
Is there a tenable workflow for the marketing department to use a SSG over Wordpress?
- WYSIWYG editor is table stakes. The lovely folks at marketing once thought I was hacking when I `ps -eaf`-ed in an unresponsive Macbook.
- They "put" images in their post. They don't "upload the image and position it with CSS".
- It's the marketing department so they have to have all sorts of bells and whistles. At the very least tracking, at most some obscure integration plug-in that as an engineer I have no kind words for. Social integrations and "You may also like..." sections also come to mind.
> cheap WP plugins that export the whole site as static to something like FTP or S3, so you can just firewall the actual WP behind an IP restriction and host the actual public-facing site from S3/whatever.
Not that I have extensive WP experience but unless you can name me an actual plugin that has good street cred for being used in the wild wild west, I'm gonna say this is not as easy as you make it sound. For one you just described a very rudimentary data pipeline which someone has to support and maintain even infrequently. Also, speaking from experience, plugins don't always play nice with other plugins. I once tried to export my very basic personal site out of WP to find the footnotes all messed up (I don't know now but back then I handled footnotes with a plugin).
I think that's exactly the point where the article falls flat. There is potentially a big oppurtunity in building a SSG + CMS solution despite the past failed attempts.
Every few years I go looking for something that's not Wordpress that you could hand to a marketing department, but there is no viable alternative (that's not Drupal).
Ironically, one of the original major reasons WordPress became popular was its dynamic nature. It dethroned Movable Type, which was an extremely powerful and extensible static site generator.
It's wild to me that this post's timeline makes no mention whatsoever of Movable Type, and at one point it links to another author's post titled "A Complete History of Static: The Beginning to WordPress Headless" which also makes no mention whatsoever of Movable Type. Now I feel old :/
To my surprise, Movable Type is still being developed even today. Wonder if there's some companies still using it out inertia. I know many moved off of it back when they restricted their free tier
I started my client's site on Hugo, withing 2 days I was editing something for them every 30 mins (slight exaggeration). They wanted something they could edit, they don't do Markdown, they don't manually write URLs they want to drag images into their posts and pages.
This is generally solvable unless they wanted radical layout changes. There are headless CMS solutions, just ensure that no texts are hardcoded and instead put in a config. Such configs can be made editable in the CMS.
Normal people refuse to learn markdown - they want RTF editor.
I could understand someone might refuse learning LaTex but markdown is so simple.
RTF editing sucks badly if you have to include it in your project. No one wants to specifically pay for implementing it but they also expect it to be there.
Nowadays you can just use one of those WYSIWYG markdown editors that come with a toolbar (incl. buttons for inserting images) and hide the formatting syntax by default.
I recently moved all my website from WordPress.
In last few year couple of them had got hacked via plugin exploits as well. I had to use "security" plugins after that i didn't have any issue but still...
I crawled own website and downloaded each, and converted to markdown then used static site generator (custom in javascript)
runs on cloudflare pages for free with no downtimes or "fee".
Switching from word press to static site generator caused disruption to my autoflow habit of posting. WordPress (I didn't have to maintain) had a gui I didn't have to think to use. I still made the switch though.
To me, the thing wordpress installs offer is the GUI. I help a few people with wordpress installs, and I've ended up setting up a private wordpress install, and then I run a script which mirrors the website statically -- this is moderately hacky, and I'm sure could be done better, but as long as I hide the private wordpress install, it means I don't need to worry about keeping it up to date.
I haven't found a static generator which has as nice a WYSIWYG interface as wordpress.
I can live preview my website from my local server / computer / laptop, while writing content from basically anything. Even a cheap and underpowered writing deck with 400 MHz CPU. The options are limitless.
You're absolutely underestimating the complexity of proper live preview of changes. This is essentially "hot reload" mode, but on the public internet, because it has to run on a public domain. Getting that right is a challenge, and if you don't know why, you haven't attempted to solve it yet.
Why would I want my WIP site to be on the public internet? This has been built into Jekyll for years. Probably other SSGs too but I don't know/use them.
For those looking for an SSG with WYSIWYG, please take a look at Publii. I have no affiliation other than being a user, but I wish more people were aware of it.
Its project page doesn't seem to have a screenshot of the post/page editor, but its editor is simplemde so one can just look at it directly: https://simplemde.com/
have you ever heard of caching? because it can do the exact same thing as what you just described, yet WP can also be dynamic, have visual page and post builders, etc...
The WordPress hacking/plugin security issue has been a solved problem for well over 10 years now if you're even basically competent. Especially if you're using something like WP Engine or Pantheon for hosting.
Sadly, SSGs can’t make money. Nor should they, because they are simple and sort of the whole point is to be simple and not require complicated resources to build or host.
e.g. you can't afford to build your own Drupal from scratch but you can afford to build an SSG from scratch and it may even be simpler than customizing an existing SSG from scratch and dodging the WTF.
It's sad to see 11ty co-opted like this especially after building a complex project on it with several thousand pages (https://www.extravirginvault.com/). Despite the complexity, I feel like it's only a couple of days work to replatform my site to a more modern SSG like Astro.
Unfortunately I don't think anyone feels strongly enough about 11ty to fight for it when the next SSG is a few Claude Code prompts away.
Friendly heads-up, because that site looks like you've put in a tremendous amount of time to style it right: The carousels clip the shadows of their children. You could avert that by giving it more inner padding and using negative horizontal margins to counter that :)
Eleventy's strength was always its simplicity and respect for the developer's choices, but maintaining an open source project solo is genuinely brutal. The irony is that the JAMstack wave it helped popularize eventually produced well-funded competitors that could afford full-time teams. Hope Zach lands somewhere good — his work shaped how a lot of us think about static site architecture.
Why does the JavaScript ecosystem pride itself in not having a framework? That’s the very thing that drove me out of the ecosystem. JavaScript was my first professional language of focus and I was in love with the growth oriented mentality as a younger engineer, but the part that irked me was that I had to constantly be rebuilding the same set of patterns with different tooling, which is the special choose your own adventure hell that is the JS ecosystem.
I left it for elixir and Phoenix and never looked back. There’s just no true ownership and direction that can come close to that of Jose Valim and Chris McCord in the JS ecosystem. It’s so fragmented that it takes the fun out of maintaining a JS codebase.
Usually the argument against frameworks is that modularity will cover differing use cases better, unlike a framework that becomes hard the moment you need to do something they didn't design for. I've been ok without frameworks, but not sure yet which way is better.
The most annoying thing I've seen in the JS ecosystem is the in-between, libraries that act more like pieces of a framework. Like you have React and foo which you'd expect to be separate libs, but everyone handles that with a react-foo package. Version compatibility becomes a puzzle once you have 2+ of those.
That's not what the article says. It's about being agnostic what kind of frontend framework/library you use, e.g. giving the users the freedom to choose between React/jQuery, etc..
if the kickstarter campaign met its goals, but then their outgoing emails ended up in the spam folders, why does that say cancel? They cite "momentum", but doesn't the fundraising success sustain the momentum of the project and team? solve the email problem and mail the sponsors again, what's the big deal, since when do sponsors need momentum if the goal has been met?
This. Totally confusing. Sounded like a very successful campaign, met goal. Why is the rest of that blog post (https://blog.fontawesome.com/pausing-kickstarter/) so negative and like it's a big disappointment? Like Font Awesome was expecting some lengthy constantly growing source of income from it? So weird. (and also, first I'm seeing anything about this or given any reason to pay attention to what Font Awesome is doing despite being a regular user of 11ty and involved with its small ecosystem for years)
And if '11ty devs' aren't big fans of the change etc, then who was rushing to support the Kickstarter? Who's funding this (and why?)
Sounds like they had a much larger actual goal in mind and the low “initial” goal was some kind of calculated marketing trick that didn’t work due to emails landing in spam.
This is how pretty much all big kickstarters work these days - the goal is set artificially low to be able to show off momentum and claim "funded in 24 hours!", and often the initial goal amount is funded by friends and family to further the illusion of success.
Maybe fans of font awesome? I backed their first kickstarters a few years ago and got notified about this one now. Possible that enough prior backers were interested enough by the pitch to feed the new one.
And about pausing the kickstarter: only makes sense if the initial goal wasnt the real goal. A successful kickstarter raises more overall money when users jump onboard the successful campaign, so you ask for less than you need to get more than if you asked for how much you really need. Pretty common.
Most Kickstarters have a fake low goal so that they can hit it and "blow past it by 1000%!!!" If a Kickstarter hits its goal, but then still cancels, that typically wasn't their real goal.
My personal page runs on 11ty since the last 3 years and I enjoyed it a lot.
I’ll probably replace it with pure HTML soon - I found that I don’t need a SSG anymore, I can just use a local LLM to generate HTML out of markdown files and I never use any fancy features anyway.
Local LLM feels like the wrong tool for a file converter? LLMs shine in natural language processing, but their statistical nature doesn't fit consistent file conversions as more Turing-like programs.
> ChatGPT responds with a fully-populated HTML template. All I have to do is copy and paste it into a new file in my project, run my custom script, and then push the changes.
This actually sounds more troublesome to me than adding a markdown file into a Git repo somewhere, and having Hugo/Astro/whatever automagically regenerate all the HTML files from markdown.
But that's probably because static site hosting services have come very far from the S3 bucket days.
But the text file has some markup syntax beyond human language? Point being LLMs are subpar for acting on formal grammars, like cracking a nut with a sledgehammer. That's why its important tools like 11ty and pandoc remain.
Yea I tried Astro but I don’t want to learn their way of doing things, have breaking changes every x months/years and who knows in a couple years they maybe also are screwed.
Pure HTML will work probably forever. Previously it was too much manual work for me to write it but now the LLM just spits it out, easy as
I'm also using 11ty on a couple projects, but I abhore the npm ecosystem.
I'm considering letting an LLM generate a flat python script to replace what 11ty does for me. Once removed from the fracas, it should be stable for decades.
I built static site publishing into AS Notes, to add in to the mix (https://www.asnotes.io an extension for VS Code). It's markdown and wikilink based, and can publish either the whole workspace or from one or more specific folders. I've designed it so that I was not dependent on any platform for my static sites. Publishing is a pro feature, but it's a one time lifetime licence purchase.
It’s basically a reimplementation of Viaweb, pg’s first startup.
I did it for fun, but I’ll probably use it for my own site. I’m not sure how fast other SSGs run, but this one only takes 15 seconds to build all ~260 essays and such.
Thinking of doing a Show HN. Not sure if it’s interesting enough. No AI except for the finishing touches (importing hundreds of essays and finding a few bugs).
I'm still completely in love with WebOrigami (https://weborigami.org). It is a 'dialect of JavaScript' that is designed for building static sites. It isn't super popular, but it much more flexible and comprehensive than anything else I've found. Fills the 11ty gap nicely.
> Who uses 11ty? NASA, CERN, the TC39 committee, W3C, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Apache, freeCodeCamp, to name a few.
> Imagine if Build Awesome actually reached out to people who regularly make static sites. You know, the userbases on NeoCities or MelonLand or 32-bit Cafe?
One minute you are saying large companies use the product, the next that it was always for hobbyists and shouldn't target corporate features?
> In truth, I myself have started a business that has a near identical concept to Build Awesome. Berry House is my independent web studio
> The difference is though that my model is pay-what-you-can, or pro bono. I developed Calgary Groups for a client and charged $5/hour for my dev work.
That is not a business -- no profit motive. (Working less than minimum wage, even.) Not a good benchmark for comparing what an actual business like Font Awesome should do.
> One minute you are saying large companies use the product, the next that it was always for hobbyists and shouldn't target corporate features?
You are conflating 11ty with Build Awesome (pro)
> That is not a business -- no profit motive.
It is most definitely a business, even if you don't think it will make a lot of money. Also the whole point of comparison is claiming that people will not pay that much money for Build Awesome.
> The truth is, there has been no successful CMS for static-site generators because the only people that give a fuck about creating static sites would much prefer to use a (free and local) IDE and a terminal.
I think a lot of less technical users would love a desktop app (or a web app integrated with their hosting provider) that lets them manage their website via a GUI, preview their changes with a split-screen view, and upload to a web host. Something similar to Microsoft Frontpage or the like.
I suspect the reason that Neocities got so popular was in part because of its web editor, and having a more powerful version of that would be fantastic. If this integrated with Git to allow version tracking and multiple authors to collaborate, even better.
Who cares? It's open source, you have the literal source code, fork it and move on.
Don't want to expend the effort to do so? Interesting.
Perhaps people need to be more realistic about the code they consume. Treat it as a finished product, take on dependencies you can either afford to maintain or don't need to be maintained at all. Have an exit plan. Relying on someone's unpaid labor to keep your own projects afloat is your problem.
> The truth is, there has been no successful CMS for static-site generators because the only people that give a fuck about creating static sites would much prefer to use a (free and local) IDE and a terminal.
I completely disagree with this. The main problem is that these people don't want to pay for such a solution.
There's a thriving ecosystem of headless CMS for commercial websites: multi-user, support editing landing pages, etc.
Things like Decap were too basic (running it for any complex blog is a pain) and didn't solve much for developers building a Github Pages blog (while also being useless to startups).
I run three static blog websites, two personal and one for our agency. I want a CMS on all of them. I want to be able to edit from the iPad, easily upload images, etc. But my hosting itself is basically free, so hard to justify paying for a CMS.
I'm using Sveltia for all three now, it's still in early access but in my experience is much better than NetlifyCMS/Decap or PagesCMS.
I use Eleventy for nearly all of my static sites. Almost every project of mine has at least an 11ty internal docs site. I'm very happy that Eleventy has a home and Zach a job.
But my only thought on this is: Eleventy is an awesome name.
Nobody is going to make money from static site generators. How can a kickstarter still raise money for something claude will give them in 2 hours I have no clue. Not all software engineering is dead, but this is dead for sure.
Though I also have no idea how a static website generator can raise tens of millions of dollars.
The author seems to think that there's only one type of user of these tools. Namely people who use NeoCities. They're all that matter to him.
Way back in 2015 I was building a large static site using Jekyll and Wordpress CMS as a backend. We had 30+ content editors using it, writing Markdown and I had Jekyll Generator that would execute a SQL query against the Wordpress database to build static content. Every new post would build and deploy the whole site in 2-3 minutes. Over 50k pages of content. This powered a very large marketing website straddling multiple top 10 Google Ad keywords. Business was bringing in several hundred million in ARR.
I knew of at least 3 other similarly large businesses doing this. All the way back in 2015. My current company today builds a static site from a Wordpress backend and I was totally uninvolved in this work (or even suggesting it). The user that this author thinks is a fable is very very real. There is absolutely a market for a CMS backend for an SSG.
Not that I as a developer would have used it, but if my employers could have paid a company for what I built in a nice box instead of paying my salary, they would have.
The irony is that a key plank of the SDNY's allegations against Roman Storm for his development of Tornado Cash is that he provided a UI (since the backend smart contract is already established as a matter of law to be immutable and outside of Roman Storm's control), and the UI that Roman Storm provided was an (open source) static HTML file that users ran entirely client-side in their own browser.
What a horrible mess. One "project" created after another one and eventually ditched in favour of creating something else from scratch. No one wants it, they are pissed and they blame Gmail for this. What a shit-show.
I don't want to learn your project, thank you very much. If anything, I'll create my own. Nowadays, it's super easy to do it with AI, but even before AI, I would have still prefered creating my own stuff instead od using yours. I don't want you as a dependency, I don't want you to become the master of my work, I don't want to try to understand how your pitiful "project" works since it would be 10 times easier for me to write the functionality I need from scratch myself. I don't want to do a security audit for your stuff and try to understand how it works while creating my own will always negate this problem entirely. I don't want to work for your "resume" so you could proudly put your turd "project" there seeking better employment. Not at my expense, not at the expense of my time and nerves.
Are you calling a custom mouse icon crap/fuckery that makes you leave the site, or was there something I missed? If you are that's a pretty big overreaction. And it's probably worth you setting the single line to disable `cursor` on all sites via userContent.css or a styling extension.
It has been a while (I think ever since Safari introduced Reader Mode), and I do almost all my reading on websites in Reader Mode. For some websites, I have set to “Use Reader Mode when Available,” such as that of paulgraham.com, daringfireball.net, and quite a few others with horrible Typography.
> I don't understand though why reader mode is not always available. The text is there.
Mostly because we don't have any standard markup to say "this is the content". Which means reader mode has to guess which tags contain the content, and this whole thing boils down to a pair of regexps[1]
I'm sad to hear that the "OG 11ty era" has ended. But, as others have noted, fortunately 11ty will live on, so long as folks keep using it and hacking away at it.
I truly don't understand how the same folks that champion accessibility and humane ideals while humble bragging about working for $5/hour to help get local businesses online can throw so much shade on people who are urgently trying to figure out a way to get paid, often just to keep the projects that they created alive so that these people can continue to use them for free.
I don't know if it's entitlement, projection or just wanting to have it both ways, but I wish they would channel their frustrations into helping to find a sustainable model for OSS creators to make a living wage to keep the magic coming instead of being shitty about people doing their best to find a forever home before their burnout finally kicks in.
Why do you think it’s the same folks? People tend to be louder when they don’t agree with something, and many topics will divide a community mostly in half. The end result is that you will more than likely hear complaints and subtle digs/insults no matter what happens.
I am hard line on not feeling sorry for projects going away, being taken over by organisations, when it mattered people should have actually sponsored them, instead of bosting how great is to get it all for free/gratis.
Every, single time, someone posts a cool paid project, there is the usual comment why pay, look at MIT/BSD/Apache/... project so and so.
On the plus side, at least there wasn't that many magpie development, and rewrites just because.
Subscriptions are the only way to fix piracy.
I'm not so sure. If they can't pay for a one-time purchase, they won't be able to afford a subscription. Subscriptions are always more expensive in the end, that's why they exist in the first place.
It feels like there is entitlement on both sides. People who do OSS work feel entitled to financial benefits, despite explicitly choosing to give their work away for free. And people who consume open source software feel entitled to unpaid labor in perpetuity. It kind of sucks on both ends.
Rich Hickey wrote an essay titled "Open Source is Not About You" [0], where he states "As a user of something open source you are not thereby entitled to anything at all. You are not entitled to contribute. You are not entitled to features. You are not entitled to the attention of others. You are not entitled to having value attached to your complaints. You are not entitled to this explanation."
This is true. Unequivocally. What is also true is that OSS is also not about the contributors. They aren't owed anything by the consumers. They aren't entitled to any compensation, and they aren't entitled to others putting effort into making their contributions sustainable, helping them make a living wage, or alleviating burnout. We're all adults here, we can stop working on something if it's causing us pain or suffering. And we can freely fork a project if it's going in a direction we don't agree. That is the nature of open source. It's just a licensing model, which only exists because of certain laws. Otherwise, it's just a decision on what is public and private. Nothing more.
So if a project isn't going in the direction you want? Shut up and fork it. Not getting paid for your work? Find a way to monetise it or move on. Don't whine about either of these things on the internet.
0: https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba95...
Eleventy might not receive new features, your website will still work.
The beauty of SSGs, in one sentence, folks.
I'm not aware of any CVEs in HTML, either.
When I really needed a landing page that looked like it fell off a UFO I did it in Vite-React (such a joy to use semantic components, like write
and it is a simple python script that uploads the dist files to S3 (no "WTF went wrong with the github action") invalidates Cloudfront [1], extracts metadata, maintains the metadata database. There's a clear path to extending the system to do exactly what I want to do in the future unlike some SSG which I will have to relearn from scratch in six months when I want to make a big change... and had it up and running and in front of end users in a weekend.That is, SSG has no commercial potential because any individual or organization which is capable of maintaining and customizing an SSG can create one from scratch that does exactly what they need with less cost and effort and success is only possible through hypnotizing people into thinking otherwise -- in many fields of software this happens every day but I think not SSG, like those people are going to stay asleep and dream of Drupal and Wordpress.
[1] ... and if I want to move to some similar platform I just implement it instead of struggle with "plugins" and "modules" and other overcomplicated extension mechanisms
As a learning exercise, I wrote my own little SSG in ocaml, and man I forgot how nice a language it is. Tooling is still a bit rough but lots better than it used to be
My little blog (in my profile) is built using it: https://github.com/girvo/jgirvin_blog_ocaml
Horrible Ocaml I’m sure, but between YOCaml and Soupault, the best SSGs are all written in this language. Fascinating really
This was the beauty of 11ty. It just puts together HTML files from templates, and maybe handles sitemap and RSS if you need. That will probably change now.
[1]: Just be sure to set `htmlTemplateEngine` to false in the config, if you don’t want to use templating features in your posts: https://www.11ty.dev/docs/languages/html/ https://www.11ty.dev/docs/template-overrides/
It's somewhat counterintuitive, but the added complexity leads to simpler projects that are easier to maintain long term. I have simple markdown files, and a separate, code-based conversion process that works well for me.
Also the documentation for eleventy was always confusing to me. I almost got the impression that "it's so simple, we don't have to explain it". Whereas astro's documentation is much more accesible; there were a handful of cases where there was something I wanted to do and astro had an example of exactly that. I didn't have to do guesswork, just follow the examples in the way the creators intended. Stuff like that is important.
But 11ty really was so much simpler if all you need is to put together some templates, and don’t want to deal with component stuff. That said, the docs really are lacking in some parts.
And I can choose whether or not to use NPM. I've thought of moving from it a few times. But it's just better and solid.
But the other side to this coin is us having problem making money. It's muddy waters for sure. For example, Manjaro Linux was dragged through the mud after they started their company. Not to mention, On the other hand, just like SSG's like Hugo and 11ty, Netlify and Vercel and others are responsible for a ton of free sites (like mine). They need to not just eat, they should be able make a luxurious life if that's what they want.
I am not against anyone trying to make money off of their OSS projects. We need good companies to make money. I just hope it doesn't become anti-consumers. Which is what the OP's concern is. Can't blame him for thinking this as well.
For those who post regular updates on those sites, there are great and cheap WP plugins that export the whole site as static to something like FTP or S3, so you can just firewall the actual WP behind an IP restriction and host the actual public-facing site from S3/whatever.
- WYSIWYG editor is table stakes. The lovely folks at marketing once thought I was hacking when I `ps -eaf`-ed in an unresponsive Macbook.
- They "put" images in their post. They don't "upload the image and position it with CSS".
- It's the marketing department so they have to have all sorts of bells and whistles. At the very least tracking, at most some obscure integration plug-in that as an engineer I have no kind words for. Social integrations and "You may also like..." sections also come to mind.
> cheap WP plugins that export the whole site as static to something like FTP or S3, so you can just firewall the actual WP behind an IP restriction and host the actual public-facing site from S3/whatever.
Not that I have extensive WP experience but unless you can name me an actual plugin that has good street cred for being used in the wild wild west, I'm gonna say this is not as easy as you make it sound. For one you just described a very rudimentary data pipeline which someone has to support and maintain even infrequently. Also, speaking from experience, plugins don't always play nice with other plugins. I once tried to export my very basic personal site out of WP to find the footnotes all messed up (I don't know now but back then I handled footnotes with a plugin).
Every few years I go looking for something that's not Wordpress that you could hand to a marketing department, but there is no viable alternative (that's not Drupal).
It's wild to me that this post's timeline makes no mention whatsoever of Movable Type, and at one point it links to another author's post titled "A Complete History of Static: The Beginning to WordPress Headless" which also makes no mention whatsoever of Movable Type. Now I feel old :/
So bye bye Hugo.
I could understand someone might refuse learning LaTex but markdown is so simple.
RTF editing sucks badly if you have to include it in your project. No one wants to specifically pay for implementing it but they also expect it to be there.
Is that what they call WYSIWYG? :eyes:
I crawled own website and downloaded each, and converted to markdown then used static site generator (custom in javascript)
runs on cloudflare pages for free with no downtimes or "fee".
if you want to see result: https://aretecodex.pages.dev/guides/recomposition
Couple of problems:
To edit content i've to use "image paste" plugin and configure its base directory, image path in project setting in .vscode
I lost the comment/upvote feature.
I lost "search"
I haven't found a static generator which has as nice a WYSIWYG interface as wordpress.
* the ability to schedule posts
* a ton of plugins
* a lot of people who know how to use it
* a reasonable WYSIWYG interface
As far as I know, most SSGs fall down on one or more of those dimensions.
Its project page doesn't seem to have a screenshot of the post/page editor, but its editor is simplemde so one can just look at it directly: https://simplemde.com/
I wish them the best.
Like, you can't afford to build your own Unreal Engine from scratch, but most can't afford to build their own game engine from scratch either.
But site builders are just string concatenation, and CMSs are just CRUD. We overcomplicate it to the moon and back.
Unfortunately I don't think anyone feels strongly enough about 11ty to fight for it when the next SSG is a few Claude Code prompts away.
[0]: https://shoelace.style/
Follow up (by OP) Cancelled (5 points, 1 month ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47282675
Related Introducing: Build Awesome (3 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47245750
I left it for elixir and Phoenix and never looked back. There’s just no true ownership and direction that can come close to that of Jose Valim and Chris McCord in the JS ecosystem. It’s so fragmented that it takes the fun out of maintaining a JS codebase.
The most annoying thing I've seen in the JS ecosystem is the in-between, libraries that act more like pieces of a framework. Like you have React and foo which you'd expect to be separate libs, but everyone handles that with a react-foo package. Version compatibility becomes a puzzle once you have 2+ of those.
I don't think that claim's anywhere in the article.
Some people do take pride in how JavaScript has come a long way from the jQuery days.
I came to the Hacker News comments thinking someone might have more information but I still don’t understand.
And if '11ty devs' aren't big fans of the change etc, then who was rushing to support the Kickstarter? Who's funding this (and why?)
And about pausing the kickstarter: only makes sense if the initial goal wasnt the real goal. A successful kickstarter raises more overall money when users jump onboard the successful campaign, so you ask for less than you need to get more than if you asked for how much you really need. Pretty common.
I’ll probably replace it with pure HTML soon - I found that I don’t need a SSG anymore, I can just use a local LLM to generate HTML out of markdown files and I never use any fancy features anyway.
> ChatGPT responds with a fully-populated HTML template. All I have to do is copy and paste it into a new file in my project, run my custom script, and then push the changes.
This actually sounds more troublesome to me than adding a markdown file into a Git repo somewhere, and having Hugo/Astro/whatever automagically regenerate all the HTML files from markdown.
But that's probably because static site hosting services have come very far from the S3 bucket days.
Pure HTML generated from a text file just works and probably will forever.
I mean it’s just my personal website which is mostly just for me to look up things quickly / personal wiki
Just a static sites without JavaScript but you still get some nice things like scoped CSS, components and being able to use markdown for blog posts.
Pure HTML will work probably forever. Previously it was too much manual work for me to write it but now the LLM just spits it out, easy as
I'm considering letting an LLM generate a flat python script to replace what 11ty does for me. Once removed from the fracas, it should be stable for decades.
https://github.com/shawwn/pg
It’s basically a reimplementation of Viaweb, pg’s first startup.
I did it for fun, but I’ll probably use it for my own site. I’m not sure how fast other SSGs run, but this one only takes 15 seconds to build all ~260 essays and such.
Thinking of doing a Show HN. Not sure if it’s interesting enough. No AI except for the finishing touches (importing hundreds of essays and finding a few bugs).
> Imagine if Build Awesome actually reached out to people who regularly make static sites. You know, the userbases on NeoCities or MelonLand or 32-bit Cafe?
One minute you are saying large companies use the product, the next that it was always for hobbyists and shouldn't target corporate features?
> In truth, I myself have started a business that has a near identical concept to Build Awesome. Berry House is my independent web studio
> The difference is though that my model is pay-what-you-can, or pro bono. I developed Calgary Groups for a client and charged $5/hour for my dev work.
That is not a business -- no profit motive. (Working less than minimum wage, even.) Not a good benchmark for comparing what an actual business like Font Awesome should do.
You are conflating 11ty with Build Awesome (pro)
> That is not a business -- no profit motive. It is most definitely a business, even if you don't think it will make a lot of money. Also the whole point of comparison is claiming that people will not pay that much money for Build Awesome.
I think a lot of less technical users would love a desktop app (or a web app integrated with their hosting provider) that lets them manage their website via a GUI, preview their changes with a split-screen view, and upload to a web host. Something similar to Microsoft Frontpage or the like.
I suspect the reason that Neocities got so popular was in part because of its web editor, and having a more powerful version of that would be fantastic. If this integrated with Git to allow version tracking and multiple authors to collaborate, even better.
Don't want to expend the effort to do so? Interesting.
Perhaps people need to be more realistic about the code they consume. Treat it as a finished product, take on dependencies you can either afford to maintain or don't need to be maintained at all. Have an exit plan. Relying on someone's unpaid labor to keep your own projects afloat is your problem.
https://www.11ty.dev/blog/build-awesome/
Safe to say there's a number around HN who have used/are using 11ty and might have some interest.
Am grateful for Zach's dedication over the years and believer in what 11ty stands for (and more recently what webc brings to the table/ecosystem)
> The truth is, there has been no successful CMS for static-site generators because the only people that give a fuck about creating static sites would much prefer to use a (free and local) IDE and a terminal.
I completely disagree with this. The main problem is that these people don't want to pay for such a solution.
There's a thriving ecosystem of headless CMS for commercial websites: multi-user, support editing landing pages, etc.
Things like Decap were too basic (running it for any complex blog is a pain) and didn't solve much for developers building a Github Pages blog (while also being useless to startups).
I run three static blog websites, two personal and one for our agency. I want a CMS on all of them. I want to be able to edit from the iPad, easily upload images, etc. But my hosting itself is basically free, so hard to justify paying for a CMS.
I'm using Sveltia for all three now, it's still in early access but in my experience is much better than NetlifyCMS/Decap or PagesCMS.
But my only thought on this is: Eleventy is an awesome name.
Though I also have no idea how a static website generator can raise tens of millions of dollars.
Way back in 2015 I was building a large static site using Jekyll and Wordpress CMS as a backend. We had 30+ content editors using it, writing Markdown and I had Jekyll Generator that would execute a SQL query against the Wordpress database to build static content. Every new post would build and deploy the whole site in 2-3 minutes. Over 50k pages of content. This powered a very large marketing website straddling multiple top 10 Google Ad keywords. Business was bringing in several hundred million in ARR.
I knew of at least 3 other similarly large businesses doing this. All the way back in 2015. My current company today builds a static site from a Wordpress backend and I was totally uninvolved in this work (or even suggesting it). The user that this author thinks is a fable is very very real. There is absolutely a market for a CMS backend for an SSG.
Not that I as a developer would have used it, but if my employers could have paid a company for what I built in a nice box instead of paying my salary, they would have.
I don't want to learn your project, thank you very much. If anything, I'll create my own. Nowadays, it's super easy to do it with AI, but even before AI, I would have still prefered creating my own stuff instead od using yours. I don't want you as a dependency, I don't want you to become the master of my work, I don't want to try to understand how your pitiful "project" works since it would be 10 times easier for me to write the functionality I need from scratch myself. I don't want to do a security audit for your stuff and try to understand how it works while creating my own will always negate this problem entirely. I don't want to work for your "resume" so you could proudly put your turd "project" there seeking better employment. Not at my expense, not at the expense of my time and nerves.
I don't understand though why reader mode is not always available. The text is there.
Mostly because we don't have any standard markup to say "this is the content". Which means reader mode has to guess which tags contain the content, and this whole thing boils down to a pair of regexps[1]
[1]: https://github.com/mozilla/readability/blob/08be6b4bdb204dd3...