4 ms·

My personal website is an odd mix of static and dynamic; that is, it's mostly static, but the blog portion is dynamic. When you hit a blog URL, it fetches a Mar

by floren 3y ago

My personal website is an odd mix of static and dynamic; that is, it's mostly static, but the blog portion is dynamic. When you hit a blog URL, it fetches a Markdown file from the disk, converts to HTML, and then jams that HTML into a template which provides the rest of the page, brings in CSS, etc. It's still fast and efficient; when one of my blog posts was #1 on HN last week, my friend texted me "good luck, hope you have Cloudflare set up". I don't, but the load average on my 2 core, 1GB memory VPS never exceeded 0.15.

eyelidlessness 3y ago
That is an odd mix (without additional detail at least). I’m curious about the rationale for dynamically rendering the Markdown. I can think of a few reasons (dynamic content templated in, reduced build time/complexity come to mind), but maybe it’s something(s) I haven’t considered.
- floren 3y ago
  It was basically a pragmatic choice. I figured the following: - For most of the site, hand-jamming HTML works fine, because I have a small number of pages outside the blog. - For the blog, I wanted easy authoring, thus Markdown. I figured if I rendered it on each request, I wouldn't need to make a separate tool to regen stuff, I could just build it all into the server; any changes I made to the markdown would be instantly reflected on the site. I wrote this in Go at a conference in 2011. Hugo didn't exist yet or I probably would have just used that. edit: I initially wrote this on Plan 9, and it's so old that there's still a mkfile invoking go/8g and go/8l individually to build it. It's 265 lines of code, which does the static content, generates the blog stuff (including creating the blog "archive" page on-demand), and manages multiple domains so I don't have to invoke e.g. apache to use the same host for multiple sites.
derefr 3y ago
Odd today, but you're essentially describing the idiomatic, pre-framework use-case that drove the design of PHP. "It's mostly HTML, but when you get to this line in this one file, run it as code [to e.g. parse some other file from some other format] and embed the result in the output." Made perfect sense in 2001 for building a static website where you happened to want to have e.g. a comments section on each blog post. And this kind of PHP was cheap enough that even your ISP was usually willing to let you slap some of it up on your /~userdir/ and point the public Internet at it.
- Andrex 3y ago
  I went from hacking up the source HTML files I designed on Geocities and uploading them to Freewebs (so I could remove the linkback/ads) and it worked really well for a while. Then I wanted dynamic stuff and PHP was perfect. Eventually I accepted the stigma it had even while I never really bumped into the ugly parts, or even treated it as a normal programming language. I think after bouncing around with Node and the flavor-of-the-week static site generators, I might be going back to PHP for my personal sites. Which is insane. If you told me I'd be heading in this direction anywhere between 2 and 15 years ago, I'd think you were lying. All I really need are template files. I could use iframes but that stinky technology actually deserves its stink.
earthboundkid 3y ago
I think people underestimate how fast computers are now. You can easily withstand Hacker News with a small VPS as long as you have a sane architecture that isn’t too database heavy. Yeah, if you launch Threads you need whatever it is Facebook does to scale. But for a regular read only site? You don’t need to spend very much at all.

by floren 3y ago

eyelidlessness 3y ago

That is an odd mix (without additional detail at least). I’m curious about the rationale for dynamically rendering the Markdown. I can think of a few reasons (dynamic content templated in, reduced build time/complexity come to mind), but maybe it’s something(s) I haven’t considered.

floren 3y ago
It was basically a pragmatic choice. I figured the following: - For most of the site, hand-jamming HTML works fine, because I have a small number of pages outside the blog. - For the blog, I wanted easy authoring, thus Markdown. I figured if I rendered it on each request, I wouldn't need to make a separate tool to regen stuff, I could just build it all into the server; any changes I made to the markdown would be instantly reflected on the site. I wrote this in Go at a conference in 2011. Hugo didn't exist yet or I probably would have just used that. edit: I initially wrote this on Plan 9, and it's so old that there's still a mkfile invoking go/8g and go/8l individually to build it. It's 265 lines of code, which does the static content, generates the blog stuff (including creating the blog "archive" page on-demand), and manages multiple domains so I don't have to invoke e.g. apache to use the same host for multiple sites.

derefr 3y ago

Odd today, but you're essentially describing the idiomatic, pre-framework use-case that drove the design of PHP. "It's mostly HTML, but when you get to this line in this one file, run it as code [to e.g. parse some other file from some other format] and embed the result in the output." Made perfect sense in 2001 for building a static website where you happened to want to have e.g. a comments section on each blog post. And this kind of PHP was cheap enough that even your ISP was usually willing to let you slap some of it up on your /~userdir/ and point the public Internet at it.

Andrex 3y ago
I went from hacking up the source HTML files I designed on Geocities and uploading them to Freewebs (so I could remove the linkback/ads) and it worked really well for a while. Then I wanted dynamic stuff and PHP was perfect. Eventually I accepted the stigma it had even while I never really bumped into the ugly parts, or even treated it as a normal programming language. I think after bouncing around with Node and the flavor-of-the-week static site generators, I might be going back to PHP for my personal sites. Which is insane. If you told me I'd be heading in this direction anywhere between 2 and 15 years ago, I'd think you were lying. All I really need are template files. I could use iframes but that stinky technology actually deserves its stink.

earthboundkid 3y ago

I think people underestimate how fast computers are now. You can easily withstand Hacker News with a small VPS as long as you have a sane architecture that isn’t too database heavy. Yeah, if you launch Threads you need whatever it is Facebook does to scale. But for a regular read only site? You don’t need to spend very much at all.