I use PluXml[1] for a while on my personal blog en other sites I've created. The contents is stored in XML files. To be fast, the post creation date and tags are stored directly in the filename. This hence benefits from native OS file search.
Smaller is better – The rise, fall, and rise of flat file software
21–30 of 152 posts
Re: Smaller is better – The rise, fall, and rise of flat file software
#22i’m using Zola static site generator for my website (after switching from Wordpress)
https://github.com/getzola/zola
https://mishushakov.gumroad.com/l/mish-zola
if you need more than that for a static blog (like Gatsby/NextJS) i’d consider you unreasonable
Re: Smaller is better – The rise, fall, and rise of flat file software
#23I remember when I got started with webdev around 2002, a lot was built on flat files. And so did I, because that’s how my “internet mentor” did it: guestbooks, bulletin boards, mailing lists, shoutboxes, CMSs. All in flat files, except I used php and not Perl like him.
Re: Smaller is better – The rise, fall, and rise of flat file software
#24I use PluXml[1] for a while on my personal blog en other sites I've created. The contents is stored in XML files. To be fast, the post creation date and tags are stored directly in the filename. This hence benefits from native OS file search. [1] https://github.com/pluxml/PluXml
writing blog posts in xml isn’t nice
Re: Smaller is better – The rise, fall, and rise of flat file software
#25i’m using Zola static site generator for my website (after switching from Wordpress) https://github.com/getzola/zola https://mishushakov.gumroad.com/l/mish-zola if you need more than that for a static blog (like Gatsby/NextJS) i’d consider you unreasonable
Last time I tried Zola (about a year ago) it was not very clear how do you use and manage themes (GIT downloads in a sub-directory IIRC) and it was way too flexible for its own good IMO. What I mean is that you can determine directories and sub-directories for everything by yourself (I think?).
In general I liked Zola but I found it hard to work with. I really wanted to set a few metadata fields, pick and apply a theme, put a few meta-pages (like blog index), write 3 articles and be done with it. And it didn't serve me well for that.
Have you considered writing a guide for how did you setup your Zola blog? I'd read and try it.
Re: Smaller is better – The rise, fall, and rise of flat file software
#26Using flat files only solves half the problem, in order to truly be able to host anywhere, you also need to be able to ditch PHP and server side processing requirements. (Wonder CMS, highlighted in this article, requires PHP with a couple of mods.)
That’s why I think static site generators are the more interesting code in this space. I’m a big fan of Gatsby, but there are several other great ones as well. This allows you to host your blog on even an old school “tilde club” type site, and it works just fine.
Re: Smaller is better – The rise, fall, and rise of flat file software
#27As someone not overly backend proficient, I love the concept of flat-file. I just rebuilt my blog with another flat file CMS, literally finished it last night, and today I am reading this article and think, whether WonderCMS may have been a better choice.. but, no I won't start over. The CMS I picked is PicoCMS - what flat file stuff have you used and can recommend? And probably important, how well does it scale? I c…
>but, no I won't start over The result looks very good so don't think it's worth. By the way since you copied your posts to your new blog but still retain them to the old one, you may want to add the canonical meta tag to the old ones.
Good idea, thanks!
Re: Smaller is better – The rise, fall, and rise of flat file software
#28Turns out there are many ways to keep doing things wrong that about the problem being users...
Re: Smaller is better – The rise, fall, and rise of flat file software
#29i’m using Zola static site generator for my website (after switching from Wordpress) https://github.com/getzola/zola https://mishushakov.gumroad.com/l/mish-zola if you need more than that for a static blog (like Gatsby/NextJS) i’d consider you unreasonable
Last time I tried Zola (about a year ago) it was not very clear how do you use and manage themes (GIT downloads in a sub-directory IIRC) and it was way too flexible for its own good IMO. What I mean is that you can determine directories and sub-directories for everything by yourself (I think?). In general I liked Zola but I found it hard to work with. I really wanted to set a few metadata fields, pick and apply a the…
Zola isn’t a blog engine per se, but a static side generator with markdown for content management
in Zola terms theme really means a pre-built site
that said, i don’t have a guide, but i have made a sleek template for Zola (link above) which anybody can use in minutes and deploy on Netlify from GitHub
the template is a blog with projects section, although it can be extended to add every section imaginable
the price for the theme is significantly lower than the hours you need to put in to build a similar one from scratch
(sorry for ad)
Re: Smaller is better – The rise, fall, and rise of flat file software
#30Maybe it is just a reflection on the state of filesystems vs databases.
There is no fundamental difference between a database and a flat file, it is all bytes on a disk/memory in the end. So it is mostly a question of balancing the roles of the hardware, OS, and application software.
For example, if the reason you are using a database is that it does a particularly good job at limiting disk IO, then it may not be necessary with fast SSDs. If your reason for splitting into small files is to save RAM, it may not be necessary if you have more RAM. If you want to do to a distributed architecture, maybe your filesystem is not up to the task and you may want a database server.