Thanks for this! I’m hoping to start a future-proof personal website + blog and was looking into using Hugo w/ Github pages. What do you think of using static site generators as opposed to, say, Blot?
3. Build times can sometimes take minutes, not seconds [1].
The performance argument in favour of static sites is not as good as people think. Anyone who is comfortable editing a Cloudflare configuration can enable Cloudflare APO to make a WordPress blog just as fast as the fastest static site setup. For other blogging platforms, one can dial up the Cloudflare cache settings to get the same effect.
It’s very difficult to get a Hugo build time above 1 minute, even for huge sites with 1000 posts. Jekyll used to be terrible but is fine since 4.0.0. My site (200 posts) builds in 2.6 seconds.
Blazing fast. My site is significantly faster than e.g. Substack, and beats the ass off a Gdoc, particularly one with any comments at all.
Also free
~Zero SEO possible for docs
Looks better, esp. on mobile.
Can do comments, with a little ingenuity
For geeks
I love tinkering with it.
versioning
I like doing custom features. You can do some of these in a doc, around half.
Some risk of losing your google account. Probably not large for almost anyone, but it has happened to two people I know and the dependence offends my aesthetics.
I don’t think Google Docs is the relevant comparison here. Google Docs is the “5 second setup time” option for people who should have started blogging yesterday, but are procrastinating partly because they think it’ll take hours or days to get started. Of course, Google Docs is not a great blogging platform—the suggestion is mainly motivated by the thought “if you want someone to do a thing, make it (extremely) easy”.
I’m more interested in comparing static sites with the services I listed in the “proper blog” section, above.
On speed:
I don’t think that going from Substack (or even WordPress) speed to something faster matters much for a typical early stage blogger. In most cases, I’d guess that incurring any non-trivial cost to reduce this speed gap before you have thousands of monthly readers would be a case of premature optimisation. (One could make a case for investing early in things like speed for aesthetic or artisinal-type reasons, or to signal various things. I like these kinds of reasons!)
If one has the tech skills to setup a static site, one can probably take the (easier) step of enabling Cloudflare and dialling up the cache settings. If you do this, all your HTML, images and static assets are cached to the Cloudflare edge, giving you similar performance to the best static site setup, no matter what platform you’re using “behind the scenes”. (Cloudflare APO makes this especially easy with WordPress because it includes a plugin to handle cache invalidation in a nuanced way. For other blog platforms, you’ll want to think briefly about what to do in (relatively rare?) cases where you really don’t want to wait for the cache to expire. It’s fairly easy to clear cache by URL, or entirely, via the Cloudflare dashboard. But you might want to write a bash script that pings their API, to make this action faster.)
On “free”: I think people should value their time at $X / hour and factor that into the calculation. Even if one is an experienced web developer, that often makes the dollar cost of paid platforms seem like a good deal.
The other non-geek factors you mentioned apply to the static site vs Google Docs comparison, but not to static site vs “proper” platform.
Thanks for this! I’m hoping to start a future-proof personal website + blog and was looking into using Hugo w/ Github pages. What do you think of using static site generators as opposed to, say, Blot?
I played around with a few static site generators a couple years ago and was not very impressed.
The main reservations I recall (based on my experience a couple years ago) are:
Steep learning curve, coding ability required.
Static site ecosystem not very mature—easy to burn hours updating dependencies, resolving version conflicts, or adding fairly basic features that other platforms support out of the box. Boring, mature software is a better choice for most people than the cool new thing.
3. Build times can sometimes take minutes, not seconds [1].The performance argument in favour of static sites is not as good as people think. Anyone who is comfortable editing a Cloudflare configuration can enable Cloudflare APO to make a WordPress blog just as fast as the fastest static site setup. For other blogging platforms, one can dial up the Cloudflare cache settings to get the same effect.
Blot, by contrast, takes 1-5 seconds (with no button clicks required) to publish a new post, or publish edits to existing post.
It’s very difficult to get a Hugo build time above 1 minute, even for huge sites with 1000 posts. Jekyll used to be terrible but is fine since 4.0.0. My site (200 posts) builds in 2.6 seconds.
Ah that’s great to hear. I’ll cross this out in my original comment. Thanks.
They kick ass (<3 Jekyll) but the learning curve has completely defeated several of my smart nontechnical friends.
If you have a moment, I’d be interested to hear what you like most about Jekyll / static site generators in general.
As I wrote in my comment below, I’ve not looked at them recently—I imagine things are better now, but I’d guess most of my reservations still hold.
For everyone:
Blazing fast. My site is significantly faster than e.g. Substack, and beats the ass off a Gdoc, particularly one with any comments at all.
Also free
~Zero SEO possible for docs
Looks better, esp. on mobile.
Can do comments, with a little ingenuity
For geeks
I love tinkering with it.
versioning
I like doing custom features. You can do some of these in a doc, around half.
Some risk of losing your google account. Probably not large for almost anyone, but it has happened to two people I know and the dependence offends my aesthetics.
I enjoy its near-zero attack surface
Thanks!
I don’t think Google Docs is the relevant comparison here. Google Docs is the “5 second setup time” option for people who should have started blogging yesterday, but are procrastinating partly because they think it’ll take hours or days to get started. Of course, Google Docs is not a great blogging platform—the suggestion is mainly motivated by the thought “if you want someone to do a thing, make it (extremely) easy”.
I’m more interested in comparing static sites with the services I listed in the “proper blog” section, above.
On speed:
I don’t think that going from Substack (or even WordPress) speed to something faster matters much for a typical early stage blogger. In most cases, I’d guess that incurring any non-trivial cost to reduce this speed gap before you have thousands of monthly readers would be a case of premature optimisation. (One could make a case for investing early in things like speed for aesthetic or artisinal-type reasons, or to signal various things. I like these kinds of reasons!)
If one has the tech skills to setup a static site, one can probably take the (easier) step of enabling Cloudflare and dialling up the cache settings. If you do this, all your HTML, images and static assets are cached to the Cloudflare edge, giving you similar performance to the best static site setup, no matter what platform you’re using “behind the scenes”. (Cloudflare APO makes this especially easy with WordPress because it includes a plugin to handle cache invalidation in a nuanced way. For other blog platforms, you’ll want to think briefly about what to do in (relatively rare?) cases where you really don’t want to wait for the cache to expire. It’s fairly easy to clear cache by URL, or entirely, via the Cloudflare dashboard. But you might want to write a bash script that pings their API, to make this action faster.)
On “free”: I think people should value their time at $X / hour and factor that into the calculation. Even if one is an experienced web developer, that often makes the dollar cost of paid platforms seem like a good deal.
The other non-geek factors you mentioned apply to the static site vs Google Docs comparison, but not to static site vs “proper” platform.