
Show HN: Clayoven – a minimalist website generator for math, code, and articles - artagnon
https://github.com/artagnon/clayoven
======
rodw
> It has been built at a glacial pace, over a period of seven years, as my
> website expanded in content.

Three cheers for slow software. Thoughtful solutions are under-appreciated.
I'm surprised how many junior devs I need to convince that the fact that
programs like vi, emacs, make and TeX are 40+ years old is a _good_ thing.

~~~
friendlybus
I agree with thoughtful solutions being under-appreciated, but you can't
correlate age with quality or goodness.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Of course you can. The question is, whether the correlation is strong or weak,
and what sign it has.

I'd argue the correlation is positive and somewhat strong, for the following
reasons:

\- Survivorship effect (not really bias in this context): old software that
survived and is still used to this day survived for the reason. Old legacy
systems in companies may survive because they're too expensive to replace, but
old end-user software survived because it is _good_. Often, it's better than
any new software - vi(m), Emacs and TeX all are - and so they kind of suck the
oxygen out of the room (why build a new, better vim, when real vim can be made
better faster?).

\- The times of vi(m), Emacs and TeX were much saner. It was because web apps
were the dominant mode of building end-user software, it was before SaaS was
the dominant business model - and both of those incentivize bad software
that's disrespectful of user's cognitive and computational resources (not to
mention privacy). People cared more about end-user ergonomics than developer
team velocity. People cared about performance, because it was a difference
between a working and not-working application. Today's software doesn't care,
because bad performance only means _the user_ can't run more than few
applications simultaneously, and that's not any individual vendor's problem.

So yeah, I find it to be a good heuristic that old end-user software that's
still in use is going to be better than new software, if you're willing to
overlook some idiosyncrasies of the past.

~~~
friendlybus
There's thousands of video games that are still around and are not 'good'. Win
XP was used for years (decade?) and the question of it's goodness was up for
debate for a long time. Something that's older will have more security issues.
You can say WinXP did a lot of good things for it's time (sane networking,
ect), but it's ability to fulfill the role 'good enough' waned pretty quickly.

Vim/emacs/notepad++ are all good enough text editors, there's not much call
for machine learning ai on text editing, what new conceptual application is
there for text editing tech? Excel has been the same for ten years because it
fills a finite hole. There are other products that age quickly spill over to
categories of programming that can always benefit from the infinity of detail
or quality and don't fill a fixed finite hole. e.g. video games.

Yeah computers as a rising force of workhorse power is only now restarting. We
had a period of stagnation for a while.

~~~
akho
Excel has been the same for which ten years?

~~~
friendlybus
The basic tech behind it. The ui has changed a lot. There was an article a
year or so ago saying the engineering team doesn't get a lot of big meaty
change to do and new rotating managers push ui changes. A few details of that
might be off, but the grid of cells has stayed.

~~~
akho
Last 10 years saw the introduction and great progress in PowerQuery and
PowerPivot. Those two make Excel a very different, more versatile, tool.

I’m not sure what “basic tech” is, or which UI changes you refer to (I think
it’s pretty much unchanged since 2007, with minor styling updates).

97 till 2007 was sad.

------
akho
I do not understand the point in these static site generators.

To me, the attractiveness of having a static website is that you get to choose
the presentation appropriate to the particular content of each page. You can
also automate some of the work in making those pages — generate a particular
folder or preprocess some of the htmls — but static site generators seem to
insist on running the whole thing.

If you are happy with a blog + a couple of similarly-formatted static pages,
why not Wordpress?

Also: ‘minimalist’ generator with its own made-up markup format.

~~~
stoolpigeon
I used to run 5 wordpress sites on shared hosting. For a number of reasons I
decided to move to a vps. It had basic resources but nothing special as I
wasn't doing anything special. They were all very low traffic sites. But even
with that, mariadb kept crashing due to running out of ram. As I was
investigating what was going on I also started to realize the huge amount of
traffic aimed at my sites just trying to compromise them. I took some steps to
secure them but I still kept having issues.

I've transitioned all but one to static sites. Wordpress really didn't bring
anything I needed that I don't get with Hugo. With my static sites I don't
come close to the resource issues I had. Things are much more secure, there's
nothing to "hack". My workflow is simple and I really like it. I edit my posts
locally in Atom. I push changes to my git repository and then build the site
and use rsync to push those changes to the host. It works great.

So that's the point for me. Much more resource efficient, more secure, gives
me what I need without losing anything.

Another option I haven't used but I think could make sense in some situations
is using wordpress as a static site generator.

~~~
akho
MovableType, from what I remember, defaults to generating static pages. It’s
proprietary these days, though. wget -r on a wordpress site probably takes a
bit too long? I don’t know.

Anyway, the task solved by static generators is trivial, so we get a trillion
non-supported github repos all building the same kind of site (basically a
Wordpress site), badly. Moving from one to another without breaking links is
hard. Wordpress at least will not go away at a random moment.

------
rangerranvir
Not sure if you guys have heard about mathjax.js. Used to be a good one back
in the days, when I used it.

[https://ranvir.xyz/mathjaxprogram.html](https://ranvir.xyz/mathjaxprogram.html)

[https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax](https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax)

~~~
Jaxan
A good alternative is KaTeX. That one doesn’t require JavaScript.

~~~
capableweb
Are you talking about
[https://github.com/KaTeX/KaTeX](https://github.com/KaTeX/KaTeX) ? In that
case, that seems to be a JS project/library, so not sure how it could _not_
require JS.

~~~
detaro
It does not require JS on the client.

------
majkinetor
I use something similar but aimed for the documentation on projects I work on.
Its a bundle of mkdocs, plantuml, matjax etc. available in docker container.

[https://github.com/majkinetor/mm-docs-
template](https://github.com/majkinetor/mm-docs-template)

