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

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.

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. 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.

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.

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.

I wish them the best.

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.

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.

38d ago by OP (5 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47247541

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

Much prefer astro.

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.

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.

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.

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?

> 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.

Aside, but related: wish this had been shared around here last month when it broke.

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)

Didn't read because of the fuckery with the mouse pointer. Why do sites have to do this crap.