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Blogs really don't need a PHP, Rails, or anything backend. It's static content. Here's how I think blogging should work: 1. Visit a web app where you create y
by jroes 15y ago
Blogs really don't need a PHP, Rails, or anything backend. It's static content.
Here's how I think blogging should work:
1. Visit a web app where you create your blog post, add pictures, use your rich text editor, that sort of thing.
2. Click the "Publish" button, which generates static HTML and runs any other processing like tag generation or pngcrush.
3. Your static HTML gets pushed out to some server that does the hosting for you. It could even be one of those really cheap shared hosting providers.
If you really want comments, let someone like Disqus or Intense Debate handle it. Pretty much any dynamic feature you need can be outsourced.
- sehugg 15y agoVignette StoryServer (http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/vignette-old http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/vignette-old) .. if you see commas in a .html URL, thank them for it. And TCL as a scripting language, whoo-hoo :)
- jacques_chester 15y agoThat's pretty much how MovableType used to work. Fun fact: it was terrible. Most bloggers I know hated it. Wordpress is a bucket of poop too, but it has the quality that when you press 'publish', the site is updated in seconds, not minutes. (I believe MT has changed since then).
- flyosity 15y agoI've been using MT since 2003 and never thought it was terrible. Publishing times (full-site publishing) was always slow but publishing an entry only took a few seconds. The new Melody project forked MT and updated the UI, it looks great now.
- byoung2 15y agoI used MovableType when rebuilding steves-digicams.com (not by choice), and it really slowed to a crawl when we did a full publish (30,000+ articles). Luckily we only had to do that a few times when setting up the site. I don't see the advantage of static files being worth the hassle of publishing when you can achieve the same or better results using a caching proxy like Varnish. We used Varnish in front of Apache on ultimatecoupons.com (all dynamic, built in the Symfony PHP framework), and once cached, pages load in 15ms (first byte in browser).
- g-garron 15y agohttp://daringfireball.net/ http://daringfireball.net/ uses Movable Type and gets a lot of visits, and I'm sure it can handle a lot more. Yes, static content is the key.
- pwaring 15y agoIt's how Greymatter and a few other systems used to work as well. The main problem was determining which pages should be updated, which usually resulted in the entire blog being rebuilt. This took several minutes if you had a few years of archives, and if anything went wrong part-way through the process you had to start it all again.
- jacques_chester 15y agoI've ruminated in the past about a better blogging system based on updating on-disk caches based on POST and not GET. I think everybody who watches Wordpress trip over and burst into flames when you so much as breathe on it has. The main problem to solve is inter-page dependency. The rest is not that hard /famouswords.
- pwaring 15y agoYou can get too carried away with scalability though. I run half a dozen WordPress blogs, plus some static sites and email for multiple domains (with AV and spam filtering) within 500MB of RAM. I don't need to implement any caching because I already have sufficient resources.
- mkr-hn 15y agoGet this: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/ http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/ It's called a caching plugin, but it also compresses and minifies stuff. Any site can benefit from loading faster. You can turn it on and let it go. It has sane defaults.
- rawsyntax 15y agoThanks for the info, after hearing people praise wordpress as the holy grail of blogging, I found it to be very very slow. Hopefully this plugin will help
- 15y ago
- burgerbrain 15y ago"the site is updated in seconds, not minutes." That is an implementation issue. That problem is in no way inherent to static content.
- voltagex 15y agoThe problem with saying "Wordpress is poop" - as a developer, that problem report has no info I can actually use to fix anything.
- mkr-hn 15y agoThis is what you get with WordPress and W3 Total Cache (the caching plugin I use). It generates HTML files, then uses some fancy .htaccess magic to send requests to them. It can even push to a CDN. My blog survived being whacked by 3000 hits from HN over the course of 2 hours without blowing up. Pre-gzipped pages are nice too. :)
- tombot 15y agoW3 Total Cache really is a first rate plugin, we've had great success throwing Varnish https://www.varnish-cache.org/ https://www.varnish-cache.org/ infront of WordPress
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- xinsight 15y agoMy concern with the wordpress cacheing plugins I've looked at is that they require the webserver to have write access to the webserver directory. This is particularly dangerous on shared webhosts, as a malicious customer on the same server could write php files in your cache directory.
- ftownes 15y agoW3TC integrates with varnish and supports a number of backend web servers. The permissions changes it asks for are because caching plugins need to create files on the server and most servers are either poorly configured or managment of groups:users is difficult, so temporarily requesting that users modify permissions so that the caching plugin can create the files for the user improves the installation experience via lowering the technical experience needed and the number of steps required. I don't recommend suPHP in practice as it's quite slow, similar if not better security can be realized by using a reverse proxy, and then running PHP in fastcgi mode for example with a backend web server.
- drzaiusapelord 15y agoI do this with WP's caching plugin and a caching plugin for Drupal. It bugs me that these aren't part of the official distribution and need to be plugins.
- rdouble 15y agoBlogger used to work this way. You used to be able to download an archive of your site and host it on your own server! The thing is, unless your site is very simple and small, regenerating static HTML becomes more of a headache than maintaining a system that serves the content out of a database.
- chopsueyar 15y agoThat is how viaweb worked. All product pages were static, and once you finished editing, you would 'publish' and it would create the static files for your online store.
- whackedspinach 15y agoI used Jekyll to generate my static content a few months ago/ Just type a text file, and then push it out to the server. I really thought that was cool.
- phsr 15y agoIn the realm of CMSs, RedDot works this way. It is a bake CMS, when you publish, it creates the whole site as a set of files. You can use it to generate php, asp, jsp etc pages, but it takes the data stored in a database and creates the files from the taxonomy stored there.
- Maci 15y agoYou must be talking about Stacey then as it does some of the described "magic". :) http://staceyapp.com/ http://staceyapp.com/
- handzhiev 15y ago"If you really want comments, let someone like Disqus or Intense Debate handle it. Pretty much any dynamic feature you need can be outsourced." If you are fine with your comments residing somewhere else, yes. I usually prefer to have them with me and to have them search engine indexable (that's free content created from users for me)
- jroes 15y agoGood point. An unfortunate casualty. It might be possible to augment the statically generated blog posts with data via the comment providers' APIs periodically.
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- zachrose 15y agostaticmatic deploy amazon_s3 FTW
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]