Jekyll

Raised as a usability problem by 35 people on Hacker News over 15 years (2012–2026), in 33 threads.

People raised many different problems with Jekyll, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 35 complaints

Site breaks on new machine; installing the right Jekyll version and dependencies is hard2026-01-05
Scrolling triggers dozens of redirected image requests, so sections take over 200ms to show2025-07-28
Ruby versioning setup was confusing and frustrating for a non-Ruby user2025-06-30
Posting became tedious: no WYSIWYG, manual image handling, builds needed for preview, git required2025-04-29
Setup breaks each time, with weird errors needing Stack Overflow searches2024-11-26
Author couldn't figure out how to build the site; build kept trying to compile C code2024-11-26
Jekyll is increasingly complicated to work with due to outdated components2024-07-10
Publishing a post requires branching, editing, PR and merging, which feels like too much friction2024-05-22
Couldn't get Jekyll running after reinstalling due to mysterious compilation errors2023-08-27
Slow compiles, scarce plugin options, and insufficient docs for writing plugins2023-07-10
Installation suddenly breaks for no clear reason and fixing it is a pain2023-02-20
Requires installing outdated Ruby and RVM just to customize themes2022-08-29
Hard to work out how to make Jekyll produce the desired HTML output2022-05-02
Jekyll still feels rather complicated to use for building sites2021-05-05
Adding content and making site changes is not straightforward; the whole process is annoying2021-01-24
Getting Started requires many detours before learning how to make a post2020-05-08
Requires manual YAML front matter, preview setup, and build/deploy pipeline; not streamlined2019-08-20
Rigid workflow forced on user; hard to add custom publishing behaviour2018-10-11
Jekyll exporter crashes and fails when exporting a WordPress site2018-08-23
Markdown with Jekyll is too technical and not WYSIWYG for most people2018-08-15
Tool feels overly large and heavy for simple markdown-to-HTML conversion2018-07-10
Setting up the Ruby environment on Windows is painful2017-10-19
Live preview sometimes doesn't refresh when files change2017-09-12
Too slow to rebuild as the site grows past a handful of pages2017-04-19
Needs lots of boilerplate code and extensions to get a usable workflow2017-03-07
Requires a tangle of Ruby gems and a hard-to-find meta-package to set up2016-10-09
Publishing a new blog post is a big ordeal and commands are very slow2016-09-20
Getting the Markdown publishing setup working was a pain, and images make it harder2016-08-18
Invisible trailing whitespace changes meaning and can be deleted accidentally without anyone noticing2016-02-02
Took over 30 minutes and still couldn't get the desired result2015-12-08
Creating posts and previewing requires many manual steps, file naming, and browser refreshes2014-01-28
Setup takes a very long time and is extremely user unfriendly at the start2013-02-01
Small edits require a tedious commit and push cycle each time2012-12-19
Site rebuilds take about 60 seconds, so the author avoids features and forks the tool2012-12-19
Static blogging setup is a royal pain, especially auto-posting updates to social media2012-09-30