I find it weird (it's even borderline disingenuous) how there are so many people on HN claiming it's easier to set up a jekyll/hugo/pelican installation sending compiled HTML/CSS/JS rendered from a local folders full of markdown files through github via webhooks and orchestrating that stack from the command line than running a wix/wordpress/blogger/whatever.

Especially when we are so vocal about data lock-in on every github submissions.

You can’t be serious. Jekyll blogs are pure text files you can download and view in a thousand ways. Good luck extracting sensible data from WordPress’ database without losing metadata. Which one has the worst lock-in? The former certainly isn’t locked to anything.

GitHub Pages with Jekyll don’t even need an explicit build step.

Are you serious yourself ? On second reading you sound like satire and irony.

Anyway, I forgot to add git to the list of tools needed. It's really easier once you throw git into the whole thing.

> Good luck extracting sensible data from WordPress’ database without losing metadata.

What ? You know you can do SQL queries, right ? And if you can set up the whole bang for jekyll/git you certainly can do SQL queries. And use the WP rest API. And the internal WP query API. You are more likely to lose integrity of your metadata stored in a yaml header in md files because of a typo at some points. How do you even start to lose metadata when WordPress enforces consistency and validation on every article saves ?

But forget about all that, that's software dev stuff. WP comes with built-in to sort and look at metadata and posts.

> Which one has the worst lock-in? The former certainly isn’t locked to anything.

Now you are trolling. You know full well I am refering to storing files in github. Which is owned by the good old and trusty evil MS. Not saying it's not easy to move things (you don't send your files only to gihub, right ?) but tying yourself to github is a worst lock-in than your own mysql database.

> GitHub Pages with Jekyll don’t even need an explicit build step.

That just doesn't make any sense. There are way more steps before you can even type 'git push' and then hit a browser URL https://pages.github.com/

And that's just for the setup of the whole thing. It's always gonna be faster to move around widgets and widgets content to cusomize sidebars and footers in WordPress than diving into jekyll templates.

And this is from a guy who spent the afternoon setting up strapi on a VPS and is getting into gatsby because it looks fun.

I agree with you that Jekyll is not necessarily easier to set up when compared to WP (even though I didn't say that in my original comment). For non technical folks static site generators, GitHub, DNS, SSL, etc may seem like rocket science, and a hosted WP subscription will be way more user friendly.

Nevertheless I believe that most software developers will find setting up and managing a static site blog pretty easy, just a matter of forking a pre-configured Jekyll / GitHub Pages repository, fiddling with it's theme, and then configuring their our custom domain and hosting options. There are plenty of tutorials on this subject.

If we were to compare self hosted WP and Jekyll then I would even argue that Jekyll is less complex, since it's just a bunch of static files behind a simple web server that doesn't require SSR or a backing MySQL database.

Jekyll writing experience may be considered worse for most, since you are required to write directly in 'md' files using markdown and sometimes even HTML elements. But again, if you're familiar with front-end development this may not be an issue to you, and I actually prefer it this way.

I sort of agree with this. I run hugo locally and have a simple bash script that generates the html, removes the remote public html files (via ssh) and scps the new html files to the web server. Kind of old school, and causes about a minute of downtime when I make a change, but it works for me.

Same reason why I set up my blog with Hugo + CloudFront. That, and to learn something new. It's neat to run your build-and-push command, and see everything deployed in a moment. Blazing fast, and you only pay for the DNS.