DISQUS

Giles Bowkett · 2 months ago

My Hacker News reformatter site Hacker Newspaper uses the same principle. I have no interest in the community features on Hacker News; I just want links. The site only supports that limited use case, but it's much, much faster than Hacker News.

elyrion · 2 months ago

Well there are plugins for Wordpress which create the static versions of all Wordpress pages. That way the apache server also has only to serve static content. The option to do everything offline is nice for some use cases, but I prefer the possibility to write and administer blog from any computer with an internet connection, but if security is the main concern then jekyll seems a great choice. A version history of a blog post is a nice to have, but nothing I would actually abandon my beloved wordpress for ;-)

Sai Charan · 2 months ago

You can use Movable Type. It is a blogger software. And it automatically generates static HTML files that will be served out for you. Its totally written in Perl. http://www.movabletype.com/

andhapp · 2 months ago

I like Jekyll but then it has its limitations like search and all that. I mean you could really use some fancy javascript and achieve it but it wouldn't be the same. There are others like nanoc, scanty and so on.

Nevertheless, its a very neat idea.

bentlegen · 2 months ago

I agree - Jekyll definitely has some shortcomings, and I (briefly) allude to them at the end of the article. They'll probably be the basis of a future article.

h3rald · 2 months ago

I recently decided to go for nanoc (http://www.h3rald.com/articles/take-back-your-s...), and I must say it has been awesome so far. Nanoc is FAR more flexible and powerful than Jeckyll (and also more mature).

andhapp · 2 months ago

Yeah, I know you did. I have seen your site and you have even done a blog post on the same. I just waste far too much time on the internet ;)

artemgassan · 2 months ago

Very good points. However is impossible to handle data driven objects, such as site search, site login, ajax reguests. I would recommend to use 2nd layer caching for your database and cache request for 5 sec. You will save a lot of bandwidth just by using 5 sec caching. If you need enterprise solution as we do use Citrix NetScaler Application.

ax0n · 2 months ago

I was going to ask "what about comments?" but offloading commenting to Disqus is a seemingly good move, if you don't mind someone else controlling that part of your site.

opyate · 2 months ago

Link to a separate comments page - the main article (high hits) stays static, and the comments page can be cached for short periods. E.g. theregister.co.uk (I'm not affiliated).

Also, you don't want this to happen:
http://img63.imageshack.us/img63/3830/screensho...

Colin Powell · 2 months ago

I seem to recall having this same discussion with myself when I first became aware of _why. He had created Hobix, the white pantsuit of blogging software and a static site generation tool. The idea was wonderful, and I'll be sure to give jekyll a spin, but I seem to recall running into the problem of only being able to make changes from my machines. Having to have things setup on the client side to make additions or corrections is quite limiting in the internet age. With Wordpress, you log on from any web browser and can update your blog. I couldn't do that with Hobix, and I bet you can't with jekyll. Those criticisms aside, I can see a number of reasons why this would be great, too.

James · 2 months ago

If you have your site on a server that gives you command line shell access, then this is easy. Log-in, run the generation script, and all is well.

Colin Powell · 2 months ago

Ah, that is an elegant solution. Of course, you'd still have to have shell access on the computer you were using (js terminals aside).

pqs · 2 months ago

For site search you can use Google Custom Search :-)

boogybo · 2 months ago

I think its a great idea.
I'm a big fan of static websites for content that barely changes.
Why would you need to bother with optimizing your servers and learn all sorts of tips and tricks about different frameworks and caching options if you don't need to.
I had a look at Instiki (static/dynamic wiki written in ruby) and I think its also in the right direction.

Very good post.

tim · 2 months ago

Can you site receive comments and such? If its static, how does that get handled?

tim · 2 months ago

nm.... didnt read the other comments. Heres another option, sort of. I needed a static version of our help site (wordpress site) to be cloned onto an enterprise appliance. I have a few scripts using wget and sed, to pull down the site. We dont need commenting on there, so it works out.

Anyone know of a good plugin for wordpress to do something similar that still handles commenting?

Janitha · 2 months ago

I too totally agree with using static files to serve a blog of site that's not really dynamic... but actually generating static files may not be the best way... you can actually reap the benefits of static file serves by using a dynamic app (wordpress or something else) in front of a caching server (cache the entire html). Moving html around can be... painful.

For example my set up:
The blog is written in Pylons and acts like a regular wordpress like site. In Apache I setup a Proxy/mod_cache (mod_disk_cache) virtualhost in front of it. So each page is hit dynamically once and subsequent results are static serves never hitting the dynamic app ever again. On updates, I just log in and update / modify / edit, and nuke the cache, so the changes are reflected once again. Like you I too switched to Disqus :) to solve the commenting problem.

This method is easy to set up, plus no need to mess with rsyning html files around or need to use a static file generator (use what ever web app you want to use)

melito · 2 months ago

I enjoy using webby. Its not perfect, but I've had better lucky with it than Jekyll.

I've also started playing around with staticmatic, but haven't produced anything significant with it to date, so am withholding judgement.

Webby: http://github.com/TwP/webby/
Staticmatic: http://staticmatic.rubyforge.org/

bentlegen · 2 months ago

I hadn't learned about Webby until after we'd begun developing the site, otherwise I might have considered it. It looks like a good solution too.

Joseph Scott · 2 months ago

In the case of dynamic vs. static, why not have both? There are WordPress plugins that do a great job of caching the generated HTML and then serving that directory. Specifically I'm thinking of wp-super-cache and batcache plugins.