Have you looked at Octopress? Curious to know what your thoughts are. When I Google for static blog hosting in general and Jekyll in particular, many results say 'Use Octopress, which is a lot more convenient'.
Creating a Blog without a backend
11–18 of 18 posts
Re: Creating a Blog without a backend
#12I 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]…
Once the plugin API goes live, I'm probably going to migrate my blog to Ghost. It's a nice in-between.
Re: Creating a Blog without a backend
#13" 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.
Once upon a time, Pyra Labs' Blogger was a tool that generated static pages and FTP'd them to your server. This was back in the heyday of Movable Type.
Re: Creating a Blog without a backend
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Once upon a time, Pyra Labs' Blogger was a tool that generated static pages and FTP'd them to your server. This was back in the heyday of Movable Type.
I remember using ppwizard on OS/2 :):
http://dennisbareis.com/ppwizard.htm
Nowadays I am using Hakyll, it's a natural progression from Jekyll and is much easier to customize (it's basically a Haskell DSL for static site generation).
Re: Creating a Blog without a backend
#15" 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.
A blog has users coming from two directions.
Readers visit the blog and consume the content. The application needs to serve pages that, as you correctly observed, are added occasionally, but don't change much. For a simple blog, there isn't much need for anything other than a static page.
From the other end, is the author. Think of the blogging engine as an authoring tool. Just like any application, you can choose to use a tool that runs on your computer (e.g., Jekyll), or you can choose to use a tool that runs as a web app (like WordPress).
The lines are blurred here, because it's entirely possible to just run Jekyll on a web server, using ssh to shell in and edit your blog files. If you keep your blog files in a Git repository on Github, as many people do, you can even do fancy stuff like auto-build on commit hooks. Then you can use Github as your authoring environment, and just commit as usual.
I think your argument really stems from an architecture shortcoming in the way WordPress works by default. There is certainly never any good reason for a web page that changes infrequently to lack any form of caching. The real question is where you do that caching. Using something like CloudFare in front of your WordPress blog is just as valid a decision as is using something like Jekyll, or adding caching to WordPress through something like WP Super Cache.
Re: Creating a Blog without a backend
#16My blog is backed by github and jekyll.
Re: Creating a Blog without a backend
#17@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.
@wyclif Thanks for letting me know. I added this box last week. I used a jQuery plugin called Tweetable that grabs tweets without authentication from www.getmytweets.co.uk. I noticed that this is very slow. Over summer break, I plan to write my own Twitter API wrapper for unauthenticated requests that is fast enough to cover my blog's needs.
Re: Creating a Blog without a backend
#18I 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]…
Once the plugin API goes live, I'm probably going to migrate my blog to Ghost. It's a nice in-between.
Thanks for sharing Ghost. I did not know about it till now. It looks pretty neat, especially since it runs on my favorite stack: Node.js and Handlebars :)