

When Men Were Men and HTML Was Static - mkj6
http://www.softinstigate.com/blog/2014/11/07/when-men-where-men/

======
JeremyMorgan
I converted my site to static HTML about two years ago, using Octopress. It
was a combination of getting sick of Wordpress breaking, and being able to
handle huge traffic rushes. (My first time hitting the front page of HN, it
crashed my site a couple times with WP).

Here's the thing though. You're trading one headache for another. Ruby is a
fast moving, but fragile ecosystem. Octopress (which uses Jekyll) is easy to
set up, and easy to customize. But long term... it's a PITA.

1\. If you want to develop your site on more than one machine, you'll find
yourself installing a bunch of bundles, then porting over your source files
and finding it doesn't work. This has happened several times.

2\. If you want to go cross platform - good luck with that as well. If you
want to generate your site on Linux it's super easy. OSX or Windows - a small
nightmare most of the time. I haven't really figured out why this is.

3\. If you try to pull down the most recent version of Octopress or Jekyll and
merge it... yeah you're going to break stuff a lot. Get ready to install a
bunch of gems, and roll back versions of stuff sometimes.

4\. Get ready for some random breaking. It happens, especially if you're
updating packages. Jekyll will just break.

5\. Every time you Google something, you usually find a bunch of Jekyll users
asking the exact same question as you, and many times it just leads to a bug
report on the Jekyll GitHub page.

All in all I would say it's still less hassle and bloat than WordPress, but
you really do trade one annoyance for another. Because static HTML is so much
faster I decide to stick with these hassles.

Jekyll is fairly good, but Ruby is an unstable ecosystem for real work. I
think Jekyll would be a lot better if it were pure Python, or something
similar.

~~~
bobfunk
We're solving some of these issue with Netlify
([https://www.netlify.com](https://www.netlify.com)), since we'll run your
Octopress (or Grunt, Middleman, Jekyll, Docpad, etc) builds on our servers
when you push to Github.

You'll still want a local Octopress install running when you're really
developing, but at least with this setup you don't need anything installed to
add new blog posts or edit content.

You can even fix a quick typo from your phone through the Github web UI.

------
sosuke
I'd love to have something like Jekyll that just makes my existing setup
static, and I can just regenerate it when I want. So my Wordpress site becomes
static, sure I'll have to fix a couple of things, comments going to a
different URL, searching would be broken, but I love that WP interface, and
I've got several sites in it. I'd love to take my PHPBB forum static, that
thing is horrible, but also nice to have, or my Wiki, both of those sites
attract all sorts of evil people, it would be nice to have them all be read
only. The longer I keep the PHPBB and this particular Wiki going the more
attack vectors are being found, I'd love to just have a bunch of HTML docs.

------
VeejayRampay
I'm not sure I understand the title or what it's supposed to mean. Aren't men
men now? Also, what is the relation between men and static HTML?

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
It alludes to a famous message of Linus Torvalds.

~~~
tantalor
Not necessarily; it is a common English idiom going back to the 19th century.

[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=when+men+were+...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=when+men+were+men)

~~~
Someone1234
Great resource. This quote from 1841 is fun:

> When men were men of manly mould, ere faith was bought, and friendship sold,
> and honour but a name for gold.

There are older quotes but I liked that one.

------
allannienhuis
I find it hard to believe how people in our industry today can be so ignorant
of the issues around the use of machismo terms like that used in the title of
the post. I believe that the author was just trying to be witty and was
probably not intending to offend anyone. But his offhand use of the "when men
were men' phrase is terribly offensive to many people.

Just to be clear: this isn't about simple 'political correctness' \- trying
not to offend anyone. This is about fixing a broken culture in our industry.

This industry has the potential to be completely egalitarian - silicon can't
determine the gender of the people who wrote the code, and keyboards aren't
particularly better suited to men's hands. Yet we've managed to build an
industry that is completely dominated by men. That's a travesty and a waste,
and deserves explicit effort to undo the damage. That means using inclusive
language at _all_ times, even if it doesn't seem 'natural'. The fact that
language like that seems 'natural' or 'innocent' to some people is a horribly
broken and heartbreakingly wrong state that needs fixing.

~~~
jobposter1234
Who would be offended by this? It seems to me the only thing that could be
offensive is the implication that modern men aren't as tough as in the past.
Is that what you mean?

~~~
allannienhuis
The phrase uses maleness as a reference to something better or great. 'real
men' are used as example of 'great'. It has the same effect as 'throw like a
girl'.

I'll admit to being sensitive to the topic. I'm mostly surprised that given
all of the attention that the barriers to women in the industry has been given
over the last number of months, people still use language like this. My point
is that we _should_ be sensitive to this issue. We should think about the
women engineers that are on the margins, perhaps experiencing harassment at
work or online, and consider how they would feel reading yet another 'manly
man' reference to being a great developer.

~~~
jobposter1234
I think the phrase actually is comparing modern men to men of the past. My
interpretation is that it's teasing softer men that their grandfathers were
tougher than them.

Doesn't seem to me like it says anything about women. I'm forced to conclude
that this is a hot button topic for you, and isn't something relevant to the
article or discussion at hand.

------
smacktoward
A good way to tell how much contact someone has with non-technical people is
whether or not they say things like "it's simple, it's just a text file
formatted in Markdown."

~~~
tantalor
I once wrote some code to let my company's staff post job openings on our site
themselves, instead of asking me to convert their word processor files to
html. Markdown was the natural choice. I never heard any complaints.

~~~
tracker1
Agreed, and with some simple "helper" text at the bottom, with a split-screen,
editor on one side, and live-preview on the other it gets pretty good.

I use MarkdownPad when I'm doing larger readme or documentation files for
github.. I can imagine it would be easy enough for others to pick up.

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programnature
Imagine being a woman and coming to HN and seeing this. Clearly a place for
her?

We need to drop sexist article titles like this from HN.

~~~
Mimu
Men refers to humanity imo.

~~~
ninjaplease
It doesn't and you're a cunt.

~~~
Someone1234
Wait did you just unironically use a sexist slur to insult someone for what
you view as sexism..? That's special.

~~~
ninjaplease
I was about to address you seriously, but you either have no idea what sexism
is or you are not interested in an honest discussion.

~~~
Someone1234
I noticed a lot of words but none of them tried to justify why you used a
gendered sexist slur to defend supposed sexism.

If you are unable to justify yourself, maybe you should consider how you
behave.

------
justinpw
It's ironic that his permalink doesn't handle a dynamic title field very well.

