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.

I've been using the same version of Jekyll, using the same outdated, discontinued version of ruby, for more than 10y.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>

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>

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I made a Paul Graham static site generator: https://shawwn.github.io/pg

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).

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?

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.

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

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.

In case anyone wondered, the title is a play on the Isaac Asimov book "The End of Eternity": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Eternity

> 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.

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.

if anyone is wondering, the photo is of the old deutz works in cologne

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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