I wrote kind of a hybrid static blog setup the other day[1]. You write posts in markdown, check them in along side the app, and then push to Heroku or wherever else you want to host it. It's just a little Sinatra app, no database or anything.
It is ironic because the real deep reason we share our thoughts is because we want them to stand out!
Databases are indeed good at storing millions and billions of things and they are designed for it.But no human being is individually capable of creating content that really justifies a "dynamic programming oriented query plan generation" each time someone wishes to access his thoughts!
tl;dr My argument is that static site generation for personal blogs is common sense!
Sure. My counter-argument is that for multi-tenant hosting like tumblr where millions of people keep their personal blogs, keeping posts in a database is common sense because they're a known quantity. Backup strategies, optimization techniques, operations procedures are all well known and battle tested.
Also, creating content using a web-based editor that saves to a database is very easy for not-so-technical people to wrap their minds around. Static site generators? Not so much.
Yes sites like tumblr definitely make sense...My argument is against running your self-hosted personal blog with an SQL server!
And of course...my argument is for the technical people only....perhaps someone among us can make a static content generation solution for everyone!
But for the majority of people constructing the html\css to do that is a chore\"impossible". Storing it into a database and providing a simplistic word editor to write up new things is the easiest way. Storing the information in a db just allows it to happen easily.
I don't think that's really irony...how is that worse then some obscure file in some obscure server somewhere? Or some obscure block of memory in some obscure cloud somewhere?
It's a shame that several years after the term "slashdot effect" was coined, self-hosted personal blogs are still vulnerable to this easily preventable phenomenon. The companies that host the majority of the world's small web sites, such as BlueHost, DreamHost, and (heavens forbid) GoDaddy, have not made any innovations in this department. Most VPS's are no different.
NearlyFreeSpeech.NET is really good at handling traffic spikes, for both static and dynamic sites. It combines the convenience of shared hosting with the scalability of cloud computing. You just need to insert more coins when you run out of your prepaid traffic.
Where is the financial incentive for these hosting companies to do so? Most users will never see a traffic spike that can take down your average VPS or bluehost site. It seems there is a gap in the market for self-hosted sites that have built-in structures to build upon that allow for traffic spiking.
Isn't the gap filled by companies like Posterous/Tumbler? For the average user, they answer the problem of "put something online and make sure it stays there" perfectly well.
I personally would recommend hosting on a VPS with a reverse proxy like varnish set up. Even if you've had very minimal experience with linux systems, it's a cinch to setup and you can get quick, fast caching up in a couple of minutes.
The Jekyll recommendation is a great one. For quick one-off articles something like pen.io is great, as well. And GitHub Pages are just fantastic if you didn't know already :)
In my experience, MediaTemple handles traffic spikes remarkably well. Maybe not ideal for the super-techies, but running WordPress on it with a caching plugin handles traffic pretty well at the $20 / month plan. And using S3 to serve static sites is fantastic. I'm on my phone right now so it's a pain to find the specific article, but Kyle Shank uses S3 and wrote a pretty handy article at http://kyleshank.com. Check it out and try to find the article. Great read.
He forgot the geekiest option: write your own blogging engine. It's a perfect excuse to use that new language and framework you're learning! Or, if you're not learning anything now, it's a great excuse to start learning.
While this is a great learning experience, it is hard to write a blog engine that will stand up to traffic spikes on the first try.
If your goal is learning a new language or framework, this is a great idea. If your goal is to have a reliable, traffic-resistant blog I think it's best to stick with a tried and true platform.
Right, if you write something akin to Jekyll it will work fine.
However, I think most people would probably be trying to learn a framework like Rails or Django if they were writing a blogging engine to learn a new language/framework.
So write your blogging engine as you normally would and then make a button which says: dump to html for each page and then figure out when you want that button to be pressed (i.e. manually or automatically).
Or use caching. My webpages are generated using FastCGI and served by Nginx. So I configured Nginx's FastCGI module to internally cache GET requests for 1 minute.
I wasn't a big fan of the Jekyll workflow, especially when I wanted to write a simple post from another device. My solution to that, an app that wrapped Jekyll, just felt hacky.
Instead, I just made a Rails app with fifteen minutes spent dropping in Active Admin and RDiscount to render @post.body Markdown into @post.rendered_body HTML. Then, I aggressively cached pages into the static `public/` directory. I chose Rails simply because I'm using Rails for more serious apps and I wanted a casual app that I could take seriously enough to practice on.
Otherwise, I'd have as much fun building the same thing in any other Ruby framework for Ruby practice and then cache the pages into a static directory.
Isn't that what any other static site generator does?
Don't most people with high-traffic blogs simply use posterous or tumblr these days so they don't have to worry about these kinds of things? That's what works for me... then the next problem rears its ugly head: bulletproofing your DNS!
People with basic blogging needs are spoiled beyond belief with services like Tumblr, but if you need more advanced things to play with, it becomes a little overwhelming.
ExpressionEngine understood the need for people with a lot of needs, but I think everyone eventually have to roll their own (using some sort of framework), if they want something that satisfies their perfectionism.
Using a platform like Tumblr makes a lot of sense, but lots of people still don't do this as evidenced by all the stories on HN that link to overloaded servers.
When my blog hit number 1 on Hacker News earlier this month (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3328619) it never went down. Running Jekyll on GitHub with my own domain julianyap.com.
30,000 hits in 24 hours.
I remember the "move your site off of GoDaddy" post last week going down this week which was run on Tumblr. Elsewhere Tumblr wasn't down so it depends on the resources they allocate to you. I suspect MG Seigler's blog is on a top tier Tumblr resource pool so I wouldnt recommend Tumblr unless you have constant popularity to your blog.
Surprised the author didn't mention WP Engine. We (along with SmartBear, Foursquare and many others) use it at Helpjuice.com for our blog and it works great.
I was a little disappointed that when he talked about Jekyll blogs, he didn't mention Octopress. The default theme looks pretty good, it has a decent set of plugins and the code display looks great. It was actually pretty easy to set up too.
Since discovering Jekyll and the fact that GitHub Pages will host your content for free, I think this would be the ideal solution. However Jekyll is a pain in the ass to use, which is why I've been working on http://jekyllbootstrap.com/
Jekyll bootstrap is intended to deploy straight-away to GitHub pages so hosting is free. I'm not finished though so any more eyeballs I get on the source will definitely be helpful. Merry Christmas =)
Disadvantages: Not for the non-geeky. You can only post from a computer where you have your static site generator set up
Not necessarily. I have a very simple static site generator (basically a single Python script, plus a few dependencies) running on a EC2 Micro instance. It watches changes in a shared Dropbox folder (using inotify and dropboxd) of a bunch of Markdown files and templates, and generates HTML posts, index page, and RSS automatically. I could post from any machine as long as it has my Dropbox account, even on my iPhone! No more command lines or git stuff, just write. Dropbox will take care of the rest.
Joe Hewitt's Nerve [1] works this way. I believe Marco Arment's Second Crack works similarly, too, but it's not open sourced yet.
Yes -- if you're comfortable with the command line and a scripting language, you can set up a script to handle your static blog. However, I suspect most people who want to blog don't have these skills or don't want to spend the time messing with the tech.
Actually it would be pretty easy to create a Wordpress plugin to do something very similar; using ob_start of php and keeping the real wordpress installation inside a subfolder.
I am pretty busy this days but if someone wants to create and opensource project that hundreds of people would love, that would surely be one.
If someone hadn't set this up as a hosted system I would have done so tomorrow, but it turns out there's already a hosted markdown + Dropbox thing out there: http://calepin.co/
Actually I've tried Calepin before creating my own solution. Calepin is 99% of what I need, but the last 1%, that Calepin requires me to click the "Publish" on their site every time, drives me nuts. I just want to save the Markdown file and it automatically appears on my site.
This isn't Calepin's fault, though. It's because Dropbox doesn't support event notification yet. The offical Dropbox API cannot inform a 3rd-party app that something changes in a user's Dropbox folder. So the app has to poll, which isn't allowed on a large scale, or ask the user to manually notify the app about updates, which is painful. See this thread on Dropbox forum for details http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=20226&replies=45
Joe's, Marco's, and mine solutions basically avoid the last part and let me just write.
It is easier than ever today to "bulletproof" your blog. I'm running a hybrid server and have found wordpress + cloudflare + w3tc to be a very solid setup. I got hit with 73,230 unique visitors (94.46% new visitors) in a 24 hour period earlier this month and you would've never noticed.
i'm sorry but this author has failed to point out the most commong cause for why a site goes down. it's not because of failing to cache...etc...most dbs will cache for you anyway... the main reason is because you probably are on apache and serving static assets directly w/o hosting them off a CDN or nginx/litespeed. if your page had 150 images/js/css combined, that's 150 hits hitting your server per page load. now multiply that by 100's or 1,000's+ visitors HN brings to your site at any given moment, ofcourse it will go down. apache isn't really good at serving static files, just relieving static assets off to cdn/fileserver is huge.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] thread[1]: http://bugsplat.info/2011-12-14-yet-another-not-very-static-...
But perhaps it is better than not storing and sharing your thoughts at all!
In any case...Merry Christmas HN!
Databases are indeed good at storing millions and billions of things and they are designed for it.But no human being is individually capable of creating content that really justifies a "dynamic programming oriented query plan generation" each time someone wishes to access his thoughts!
tl;dr My argument is that static site generation for personal blogs is common sense!
Also, creating content using a web-based editor that saves to a database is very easy for not-so-technical people to wrap their minds around. Static site generators? Not so much.
NearlyFreeSpeech.NET is really good at handling traffic spikes, for both static and dynamic sites. It combines the convenience of shared hosting with the scalability of cloud computing. You just need to insert more coins when you run out of your prepaid traffic.
The other services are just hosting many websites on a server.
I think it cost me about 10 cents. Brilliant.
Upload to server as html.
Add.htaccess rule to redirect old dynamic page to static page. (when traffic dies, remove rule)
Or if you are running WordPress, just install wp-super-cache and when a traffic spike happens, click the "lockdown" button.
In my experience, MediaTemple handles traffic spikes remarkably well. Maybe not ideal for the super-techies, but running WordPress on it with a caching plugin handles traffic pretty well at the $20 / month plan. And using S3 to serve static sites is fantastic. I'm on my phone right now so it's a pain to find the specific article, but Kyle Shank uses S3 and wrote a pretty handy article at http://kyleshank.com. Check it out and try to find the article. Great read.
If your goal is learning a new language or framework, this is a great idea. If your goal is to have a reliable, traffic-resistant blog I think it's best to stick with a tried and true platform.
However, I think most people would probably be trying to learn a framework like Rails or Django if they were writing a blogging engine to learn a new language/framework.
More things to learn. Yay!
Instead, I just made a Rails app with fifteen minutes spent dropping in Active Admin and RDiscount to render @post.body Markdown into @post.rendered_body HTML. Then, I aggressively cached pages into the static `public/` directory. I chose Rails simply because I'm using Rails for more serious apps and I wanted a casual app that I could take seriously enough to practice on.
Otherwise, I'd have as much fun building the same thing in any other Ruby framework for Ruby practice and then cache the pages into a static directory.
Isn't that what any other static site generator does?
ExpressionEngine understood the need for people with a lot of needs, but I think everyone eventually have to roll their own (using some sort of framework), if they want something that satisfies their perfectionism.
30,000 hits in 24 hours.
I remember the "move your site off of GoDaddy" post last week going down this week which was run on Tumblr. Elsewhere Tumblr wasn't down so it depends on the resources they allocate to you. I suspect MG Seigler's blog is on a top tier Tumblr resource pool so I wouldnt recommend Tumblr unless you have constant popularity to your blog.
http://octopress.org/ My blog using the default theme: http://www.trevoroakes.com
Jekyll bootstrap is intended to deploy straight-away to GitHub pages so hosting is free. I'm not finished though so any more eyeballs I get on the source will definitely be helpful. Merry Christmas =)
Not necessarily. I have a very simple static site generator (basically a single Python script, plus a few dependencies) running on a EC2 Micro instance. It watches changes in a shared Dropbox folder (using inotify and dropboxd) of a bunch of Markdown files and templates, and generates HTML posts, index page, and RSS automatically. I could post from any machine as long as it has my Dropbox account, even on my iPhone! No more command lines or git stuff, just write. Dropbox will take care of the rest.
Joe Hewitt's Nerve [1] works this way. I believe Marco Arment's Second Crack works similarly, too, but it's not open sourced yet.
[1]: https://github.com/joehewitt/nerve/
I am pretty busy this days but if someone wants to create and opensource project that hundreds of people would love, that would surely be one.
This isn't Calepin's fault, though. It's because Dropbox doesn't support event notification yet. The offical Dropbox API cannot inform a 3rd-party app that something changes in a user's Dropbox folder. So the app has to poll, which isn't allowed on a large scale, or ask the user to manually notify the app about updates, which is painful. See this thread on Dropbox forum for details http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=20226&replies=45
Joe's, Marco's, and mine solutions basically avoid the last part and let me just write.