On: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time

[vitorfs]

yes because of a bad design decision I made to create a custom "related posts", which is a code that searches all my markdowns to pick the best pages and add to the current page. so even with `--incremental` it take quite some time to regenerate

[lostapathy → vitorfs]

Not really fair to blame the performance on Jekyll, then. Presumably you could build yourself to the same issue with any other generator.

[vitorfs → lostapathy]

that's a good point and I agree with you

to be honest jekyll still serves the purpose really well (especially for the reader)

the site is still sitting on an inexpensive entry-level cloud server, it's relatively fast, serves 300k+ page views every month and it give me some passive income

i'm pretty sure that if one uses the framework properly it can still hold on very well

i think what left me with a mixed feeling about static site generators is that it is constantly holding you back whenever you think about growing your website. i ended up building a django api that runs on the same vpc as the blog itself, and i used it to expand some features, like reading from google analytics the total page views for a given blog post, or consuming the disqus api to list the latest comments on the home page. this kind of thing.

managing the posts in static files is quite challenging as the number of posts grows. at some point you will want to change some info, or add a certain metadata and you will need to write a script to walk the _posts dir and edit the files (maybe there's a better way of doing that :P)

[NortySpock → vitorfs]

I wonder if you could save some time with some caching?

Find all posts related to "django", select the top 3, pin them as the related posts for all django entries? You'd trade out some uniqueness and slightly increased memory usage to gain speed.

(I just got started blogging and found https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite python static site generator worked well for me. Obviously you're probably a bit far in to switch horses by now.)

[Lammy → vitorfs]

I wouldn't call that a bad design decision if all it needs is a `if Jekyll.env == "production"` :)

[emj → vitorfs]

20 years ago that was my first useful custom CGI script, it took the metadata of the current page and ran a grep for pages with similar tags. Running that was really fast and flexible until I published it and got my first ten simultaneous visitors.

Then I learned about how hard it is to use a cache.