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 hadn't heard of WP Engine. I'll have to check it out. Thanks for the tip.
Bulletproof your blog – survive the Hacker News effect
31–40 of 47 posts
Re: Bulletproof your blog – survive the Hacker News effect
#32Disadvantages: 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, i…
Sounds like it still requires more setup than the average non-geek is willing to do.
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.
Re: Bulletproof your blog – survive the Hacker News effect
#33He 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.
It's not hard. Just write a blog engine that generates static html pages.
Re: Bulletproof your blog – survive the Hacker News effect
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's not hard. Just write a blog engine that generates static html pages.
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.
Re: Bulletproof your blog – survive the Hacker News effect
#35Disadvantages: 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, i…
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/
Re: Bulletproof your blog – survive the Hacker News effect
#36It 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.
Re: Bulletproof your blog – survive the Hacker News effect
#37Disadvantages: 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, i…
Sounds like it still requires more setup than the average non-geek is willing to do.
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.
Re: Bulletproof your blog – survive the Hacker News effect
#38Disadvantages: 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, i…
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.
Re: Bulletproof your blog – survive the Hacker News effect
#39Disadvantages: 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, i…
Sounds like it still requires more setup than the average non-geek is willing to do.
Sure. I'm not addressing the non-geeky part of the problem :)
Re: Bulletproof your blog – survive the Hacker News effect
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not hard. Just write a blog engine that generates static html pages.
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).
More things to learn. Yay!