New Site Who This

Secret Hidden Level 1 Header ¶

This is my first post. Enjoy!

Joke’s on you, this isn’t my first rodeo with static site generators and as an experienced beginner level experimenter, I have a few complaints about static site generators.

I mean, why not have your first post be a complaint?

First, some history.

So, at one point in time at some point in time last year (2017) or so, I read somewhere that it was a great idea to showcase yourself by having a personal website as like a part-CV part experience point of reference.

Convinced, I set out to create a website.

Given that I’ve surfed GitHub for ages now, I know that GitHub lets you host websites for free! So, I decided, why not try it?

Here’s where the first static site generator that I’ve tried comes in.

GitHub uses Jekyll to deploy static sites. And it’s great, there’s nothing wrong with Jekyll.

Here’s where the complaints start.

  1. It’s so limited by default. I’m pretty sure at some point in time, Jekyll had support for tags but now it doesn’t.
  2. GitHub Pages has a list of whitelisted plugins meaning that if there is some awesomely useful plugin you need and it isn’t whitelisted, you need to either statically generate your site locally, or use automation to generate your site and then commit it to GitHub. Of course, it makes sense that GitHub wouldn’t want unknown URLs being executed on their servers, but it’s annoying.
  3. It’s so needlessly complex and yet it’s not. Jekyll is pretty simple but when you dive into collections, some weird things happen if you can’t understand what you’re meant to configure (which I couldn’t).
  4. External dependencies are the worst thing ever. What the hill is wrong with the web? Why is there such a cluster of obscure dependencies and so many different frameworks that different people decide that they will use. Like there’s posts on the internet on stuff like gulp vs yarn vs something I don’t care about. I get variety is the spice of life but seriously…

Anyways, I recreated my site two major times.

The first time, it was a GitHub pages-safe theme.

The second time, it wasn’t GitHub pages safe but at least I got instructions on how to build the site and how to automatically push it to GitHub.

Until I broke it.

Because I tried to update it to the latest version, manually, and only partially updated it.

I gave up trying to fix that cluster of ducks.

So, far forward to literally almost just today. And this site is built using Hugo now. It’s been great so far but…

  1. There’s like literally almost no tutorial. It’s the shortest tutorial for any.
  2. Yea, I can’t think of anything else right now and I should actually be doing a uni assignment.

IT’S BEEN PRETTY CHOICE, BRUH

Final complaint of the day:

  • Static site generators have literally the least detailed documentation ever. Like Jekyll just gives you a bunch of configuration options. and Hugo just tells you there’s these things without much explanation for how to use it. (Maybe I need better wording…)

Anyways, thanks for reading.

Please, read more posts, thanks.