
Creating a Blog without a backend - salehhamadeh
http://shamadeh.com/blog/blogging/2013/12/24/MovingToJekyll.html
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Squid_Tamer
Maybe 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.

~~~
salehhamadeh
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.

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ForHackernews
" 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.

~~~
salehhamadeh
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.

~~~
redwall_hp
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.

~~~
danieldk
I remember using ppwizard on OS/2 :):

[http://dennisbareis.com/ppwizard.htm](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).

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pothibo
I 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.

~~~
salehhamadeh
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.

~~~
pothibo
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](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.

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mvsastry
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'.

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wyclif
@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.

~~~
salehhamadeh
@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.

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serverascode
My blog is backed by github and jekyll.

