WordPress To Jekyll And Back Again

I can't tell from the site itself, since it's non-responsive (back to WordPress?), but from the comments here it appears the author objects to Jekyll regenerating the entire site every time.<p>If that's the case then I suggest he tries Hakyll, which has a dependency system built in so that it only rebuilds what it needs when files change.<p><a href="http://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/" rel="nofollow">http://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/</a>

Maybe I didn't get something about this static blog generating trend thing, but what would be wrong about having a 'normal' database-backed blog software that simply renders the pages staticly to a file (as it is an option with Rails caching) ? That would work with some simple inexpensive DB like SQLite, but still leave the system flexible and easy to edit with a backend.

OK, so obviously I suck at server configuration/optimization. Any tips for optimizations that could have enabled me to support the influx of Hacker News traffic?<p>Note:<p>* Ubuntu 512MB on Rackspace<p>* Apache<p>* Wordpress with wp-super-cache and minimal plugins enabled<p>Thanks for the feedback!

Regarding the time it takes to build the site - is everything rebuilt every time in Jekyll?<p>You'd think there would be some sort of dependency build tree ala make/rake so only items whose source components would need to be rebuilt (which, in some cases could be the whole site).

I am amused by the site being down. Going back to WordPress, he presumably forgot that a cache plugin is pretty much required. Not that Jekyll is perfect, but that's one area where it's pretty much impossible to beat.

One more "geekCred--;" for letting WordPress (or whatever) convert two '-' to a single '–'.<p>More on topic, though: I don't think anyone is seriously claiming that both solutions are equivalent or easily interchangeable. For me the simple and 'process the files once' approach makes a lot of sense and even seems more transparent than a big beast like WordPress. Whether Jekyll or Blosxom - something that feels less like a CMS and more like a way to write simple texts.<p>1: <a href="http://www.blosxom.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.blosxom.com/</a>

Regarding your use of Markdown, I had a similar experience.<p>I've had Markdown on my WordPress install for many years, but only recently decided to commit to learning the main commands off by heart, and use it whenever possible. Markdown's not perfect, but committing to it has sped up writing a lot.

You could also <i>Blog like a Hacker</i>[1], and use no servers at all, like Amazon's CTO Werner Vongels[2].<p>You can see more from his own comments when he posted it on Hacker news[3].<p>[1] <a href="http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/11/17/blogging-like-a-hacker.html" rel="nofollow">http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/11/17/blogging-like-a-hac...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2011/08/Jekyll-amazon-s3.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2011/08/Jekyll-amazon-s3...</a><p>[3] <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2896860" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2896860</a>

I like that I can run my Jekyll blog for free on Heroku, and it is served entirely out of Varnish. Seems like you are paying more money for crap performance.<p>In addition, my blog regenerates in &#60; 5 seconds on Ruby 1.9.3.

A week ago, Jack Baty, also having been allured by static site generation hotness, switched back to Wordpress after it took 8 minutes to regenerate his Jekyll blog with over 1,600 posts. "Life's too short."<p><a href="http://jackbaty.com/2011/10/new-blogging-hotness/" rel="nofollow">http://jackbaty.com/2011/10/new-blogging-hotness/</a><p>At the moment, Jekyll (via Octopress) is more interesting/educational to me than plugging away at familiar Wordpress, so I'll cross that bridge when I get there.

I remember when everybody moved on to WordPress while I stayed on MovableType 2.6. I finally moved one year and a half later, when my 400+ posts made the building time absolutely unbearable.<p>Are there any Jekyll blogs with hundreds or thousands of posts?

If the runtime was the main issue, couldn't you just mod jekyll to only regen based on new data (modding site.process basically)...obviously if you changed templating information you'd want to regen everything, but....

Wish i could read the blog post. I am quite a happy Jekyll user.<p>And while Jekyll still has some downsides it is superior when it comes to handling a load spike from a HN post.

Still can't load the website. If anyone could paste the text of the article here. :-) (WordPress To Jekyll And Back Again And Finally To HN)