Comment by dangus
5 days ago
Shoehorn basic interactivity like comments?
https://gohugo.io/content-management/comments/
This includes a giant list of open source commenting systems.
I really don’t understand why people commonly say static site generators are a good candidate for building your own when there are a good selection of popular, stable options.
The only thing I don’t like about Hugo is the experience of using other people’s themes.
https://cthor.me/SSG
Getting someone else's SSG to do exactly what you want (and nothing more) takes longer than just building it yourself. Juice isn't worth the squeeze.
I disagree with your take there.
> It took me a weekend to write the initial Perl script that made this site. It took me another weekend to do the Rust rewrite (although porting all the content took two weeks). These are not complicated programs.
My last Hugo site took 30 minutes to deploy, not a whole weekend. Picked a theme, pasted in content.
> You want free web hosting? Hugo might be the right option.
An extremely good reason to pick Hugo especially if you don’t have the know-how to build your own SSG. You don’t need to know a programming language at all to use it.
Again, I have to throw criticism toward this idea that everyone who wants a static site generator already has the skills required to make one.
And I’m not saying it covers every use case like the kind of person who is willing to pay $100+ per year on a full blown solution like Shopify and Squarespace. It fits a niche: someone who wants their content online without coding with no hosting cost and doesn’t want to rely on third party platforms like Substack.
Pretty much every single option there involved letting a 3rd party collect and own the comments.
If you're fine for 3rd parties to own all your comments and content, why even take on the extra effort of hosting or managing or building your own website? That's basically what social media is for.
What do you mean? The list has more open source options than not. You can self-host those.
It’s going to be easier to self-host a drop-in comment system than an entire dynamic site plus/including comment system.
If you want interactivity, we agree, you have to either run a server, or you have to use a 3rd party.
It's easier for a server to render markdown than it is for an SSG site to do server stuff.
Your suggestion for comments is to run a server/use a third party, and do SSG. My suggestion is to just run a server. One is clearly easier as it has fewer steps.
The idea that you can run a decent personal website without compromising on interactivity, and without running a server or using 3rd parties is a myth. As soon as you accept that you have to run a server, SSG becomes an unnecessary extra step.
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