Static-site success: Jekyll against the rest of the world
Dynamic is evil
It's not, really. But bear with me for a moment… WordPress is a wonderful but complex system that’s largely responsible for the blogging revolution of the past decade. Its security track record isn’t the best and you can like its code or not. The fact remains that it is software running on a public-facing server, installed and run by people who shouldn’t touch a server if their life depended on it. WordPress perpetuates this with their “famous 5-minute installation”. In an ideal world, they would recommend people without a clue to simply use their hosted solution, which is fine. But then, we don’t live in an ideal world. Imagine you’re publishing a new post on your site. How often does that content change? Is it really necessary to recreate the final HTML output you deliver to your users every single time someone accesses your site? Query the database, run it through the templating engine, run it through plugins, render HTML, deliver. That’s a lot of work. [pullquote]your static content should be generated statically, delivered to your visitors as is[/pullquote] Most likely, you won’t notice this immediately. But if your site suddenly becomes popular, chances are, it won’t scale very well. It could go down. Of course there’s options for you if you wish to stay dynamic and have that flexibility. You could use caching plugins or even full-fledged web accelerators like Varnish. To me, this is just throwing huge piles of code and applications at the problem. The problem is: your static content should be generated statically, delivered to your visitors as is. That’s dealing with the problem in the right way. Easy for me to say, right? There are downsides:- Statically generated pages usually offer no way of showing any sort of dynamic content.
- If you need comments on your site—a common request, though why you would want that is beyond me—you would have to resort to external providers like Disqus or other commenting platforms. There’s pros and cons to this, I’ll let you decide.
- If you want your visitors to be able to search, you need to implement it yourself on the client-side.
Externally, you could use Google Site Search.
What does Jekyll do?
Look, that’s my Terminal running Jekyll in serve mode. It launches a tiny web server and let’s me live preview all the changes in my site in my browsers of choice. Locally.
What Jekyll doesn't do
With Jekyll, you start out with nothing. Nothing at all. It actually allows you to generate a very simple blog-ready site with jekyll new, but it’s just something to start from and learn the structure of how a Jekyll site can be built. You should really be interested in starting from scratch. If all you want to do is download a theme and start writing, you should probably go elsewhere. Try Medium, it’s a well-designed service with a great community, made for people who just want to write. Now you can even publish directly to Medium from the best editor in the world. If you think this sounds like loads of fun, go for it. You will not regret it.Serene
So now I'm sitting here with BBEdit and Ulysses, coding and writing. Which is really all I ever wanted. I do it in the environment I desire to be in. It frees me.
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