Creating a Blog without a backend
shamadeh.com
Creating a Blog without a backend
1–10 of 18 posts
Re: Creating a Blog without a backend
#2Maybe I'm noticing a trend that doesn't exist, but it seems to me that the web industry is slowly realizing how much the original designers of the web got right.
RESTFUL services bring back the focus on URLs and HTTP methods. For a while there was a craze of embedding content in awful Flash and Java applets, but that died out because of convenience, better browsers, and SEO. I wonder if the future of the web is going to look a lot more like its history than we thought.
Re: Creating a Blog without a backend
#3" When I first read about that, it was impossible to believe. The site was saying that the blog works without data, which is essential for any blog."
What? There's never been any really good reason for blogs to be database-backed in the first place. Blogs are just static websites with new pages added frequently.
Re: Creating a Blog without a backend
#4Maybe I'm noticing a trend that doesn't exist, but it seems to me that the web industry is slowly realizing how much the original designers of the web got right. RESTFUL services bring back the focus on URLs and HTTP methods. For a while there was a craze of embedding content in awful Flash and Java applets, but that died out because of convenience, better browsers, and SEO. I wonder if the future of the web is going…
That's a good point. In my opinion, HTTP's success is due to its platform-independent nature and its simple yet effective text-based communication protocol. Standardized solutions are the way to go.
Flash died because it was private and for Adobe. Java will not remain a strong web language as long as it is for Oracle.
I predict a great future for HTML5 WebSockets, as well as other open-source API's and protocols.
Re: Creating a Blog without a backend
#5" When I first read about that, it was impossible to believe. The site was saying that the blog works without data, which is essential for any blog." What? There's never been any really good reason for blogs to be database-backed in the first place. Blogs are just static websites with new pages added frequently.
It may be evident for you since you probably have seen many frameworks and implementations. Before hearing about Jekyll, I only used Blogger and WordPress, which relies on the database for almost everything.
Re: Creating a Blog without a backend
#6I really don't see the benefits of a blog without a backend. Don't get me wrong, I used jekyll a while back and when I used it, everything was awesome.
But then I wanted to do simple stuff like editing a post from another computer that didn't have access to my server because one of my post had a typo.
Then I wanted to list all my blogs by published date and have a different place where I could list post by [type|tag].
Some of those features are available through jekyll, but seriously, what's the difference between parsing a database for post of type X and having jekyll build a list of post on XYZ requirements?
I hope you don't think that database backed blog are slow because on 128mb RAM I had over 20k unique per day on my site. Running Wordpress, without any caching.
Re: Creating a Blog without a backend
#7I really don't see the benefits of a blog without a backend. Don't get me wrong, I used jekyll a while back and when I used it, everything was awesome. But then I wanted to do simple stuff like editing a post from another computer that didn't have access to my server because one of my post had a typo. Then I wanted to list all my blogs by published date and have a different place where I could list post by [type|tag]…
Hey pothibo. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Honestly, I chose not to go with Wordpress for 2 reasons. First is that it needs a server. Using Jekyll, I am able to leverage Github pages to serve my website for free. The second reason is that Wordpress is not easy customize (from a programmer's perspective). I tried to learn Wordpress themes but stopped after sensing how much time this would take me. Jekyll's themes were self-explanatory code, allowing me to plug my website's same CSS files and HTML template into the blogging platform. For Wordpress, I had to use PHP and learn theme functions and learn how to package the theme beforehand.
I know Wordpress has wide collection of plugins, but coders like me always prefer to write their own stuff.
Re: Creating a Blog without a backend
#8I really don't see the benefits of a blog without a backend. Don't get me wrong, I used jekyll a while back and when I used it, everything was awesome. But then I wanted to do simple stuff like editing a post from another computer that didn't have access to my server because one of my post had a typo. Then I wanted to list all my blogs by published date and have a different place where I could list post by [type|tag]…
Hey pothibo. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Honestly, I chose not to go with Wordpress for 2 reasons. First is that it needs a server. Using Jekyll, I am able to leverage Github pages to serve my website for free. The second reason is that Wordpress is not easy customize (from a programmer's perspective). I tried to learn Wordpress themes but stopped after sensing how much time this would take me. Jekyll's themes…
You seem to think that I'm rooting for Wordpress, I'm not. I just used it as everyone knows what Wordpress is. I'm currently using my own blog engine (https://github.com/pothibo/ecrire). What I wanted to say is that as soon as you need some feature for your blog, you'll end up using something that is powered by a database.
Re: Creating a Blog without a backend
#9" When I first read about that, it was impossible to believe. The site was saying that the blog works without data, which is essential for any blog." What? There's never been any really good reason for blogs to be database-backed in the first place. Blogs are just static websites with new pages added frequently.
It may be evident for you since you probably have seen many frameworks and implementations. Before hearing about Jekyll, I only used Blogger and WordPress, which relies on the database for almost everything.
But that's only to provide a convenient admin interface for people who don't want to write posts in HTML (or markdown or whatever)
I guess what I'm saying is that (except for the comments) blogs are static pages that contain (mostly) unchanging content, not dynamic data that needs to be updated.
If you're curious about the history, you might look into MovableType, which predates WordPress by a couple years, and has always supported static page generation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_Type
Re: Creating a Blog without a backend
#10@salehhamadeh One small nitpick: the Twitter portion of the social media bar, on mouseover, slightly covers up the "S" in your first name while viewing in 1280 x 800 res and on Chrome.