A group of us got together and put this together.

We decided that Wordpress sucked for us. Then we stepped into static blogging with Pelican. Then we realized that static blogging kinda sucks too. Setting it up and the dearth of themes are rough.

Can you give us some feedback? We're still working on this together, and would love to hear what you guys think.

I know people who run galleries and such things, who find Wordpress too complicated. Markdown is great because they can do rich formatting without needing to learn HTML, but with more control that WYSIWYG. Maybe you want to post a tutorial to add a CNAME to Dropbox. I don't think they really care that the urls would look like /u/xyz/file.html|jpg. What's missing is a markdown editor and light CMS, perhaps.

Great idea and presentation. A few immediate questions: What are the limits of what I can do with this? Can I add commenting, tags or search? How easy is it to edit the pages (what syntax do I use)? And why do I need to provide a host? Paying a little extra for included hosting seems a no brainer.

This is the kind of thing I think NearlyFreeSpeech.net[1] would be well suited for.

They appear to have tuned their servers and business model for static web sites - if they don't serve any of your files, you pay nothing. Otherwise, you pay only for what you use.

Disclaimer: I've never used their services, but I've checked them out from time to time.

[1] https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/hosting

Great questions.

Commenting is made possible with Disqus, the third-party comment system.

Search can be done using Google custom search. We're looking into better ways to do this.

Sites are updated using Markdown or LaTex.

We're looking at building hosting into this as well. For now, we're helping make it easier and pushing it to your FTP or S3 buckets.

I was looking for something like this the other day and found a mine-field of services which seemed like they never went anywhere. Sometimes I would like to be able to throw up a site where I can create content using something like Editorially, have automatically backed up and not have to mess with everything else involved in running a site and making sure content is backed up.

I was looking for something which could run Markdown files from Dropbox (and pick the folder from which they are pulled.) I would also like to be able to make posts (or even the entire site) private if needed (publishing workflow.)

Thanks for pointing this out. This was a post we pushed earlier, we weren't quite ready to open the doors yet.

This post is a more comprehensive overview of what we're trying to do.

That logo is taken http://dcurt.is/

I'm pretty sure that guy doesn't have a monopoly on using stylized thunderbolts as a logo.

True, but his brand is already powerful and has established meanings and connections in the same market with his blogging platform. It's not illegal or anything, but why fight a mindshare battle you don't have to?

So... kinda like a cross between WooThemes and jekyll (or hyde)? Seems like a pretty good idea -- especially for a large subset of business websites where <favorite CMS> is overkill.

Yeah, so it actually is using Jekyll right now for the engine, and we plan to support Pelican in the future. You can just buy our themes if you want, or you can use our engine to generate your posts in the cloud without all the setup.

So is the target audience non technical people (or people who can't be bothered)? Sounds like a good idea. I love jekyll, but I can't recommend it to anyone not comfortable with HTML and CSS.

That's the exact same problem we had, and all of our potential clients had. We want to make it easier to use, more accessible.

We talked to 3 types of customers. The non-technical were largely disinterested. We're still too early for that. Agencies were all over this for their clients though. Great feedback from them.

Interested in your strategy for ecommerce sites. I wonder if foxycart integration would make sense.

I don't get this. As fast as static blogging is, in-memory applications:

1) will actually beat static files in speed

2) you lose none of the flexibility of databases. In fact, because your effective query impact is going to be much smaller, you gain. Not in what can theoretically be done, but in what can be done practically without impact on response time, you gain a lot. Also expressivity gains (SQL is good, but it doesn't match general programming languages) (e.g. drawing a graph of "this person replies to this person and never replies to this other person" would be feasible).

I suppose there's problems too:

3) you lose that your state is always on-disk. In other words : there's a chance that you/your developer will get it wrong, but you won't notice it until your process restarts, which can be months.

4) of course, you have to start monitoring memory usage in these kinds of scenarios.

... Serving up static HTML/CSS/JS will always be faster than having to render on the server-side.

Now the tradeoff is that you can't have certain dynamic elements based on state unless you use a third party service (i.e. comments). But that's obvious.

No it won't. There's lots of problems with doing that.

1) you need to -at least- check the disk for updates. On linux, you need to update access time. This will take time. In memory has no such obligations.

2) you still need to compress the file in memory. You can cache the result of the compression, but that won't buy you much. Specifically it'll be too large to ... see point 3.

3) Because in practice pages are generated from very little data (the template is -way- shorter than the filled in sent out text), the ability to work with the data in little pieces without allocating large buffers in memory will avoid trampling the cache, which is going to get you an insurmountable advantage.

And this is ignoring the elephants in the room:

1) Because it's a static file, you'll have to send more data to the client side in total to achieve the same result (e.g. look at how GWT does it, and even there).

2) Because you still want to show customers "their" page, you'll need several more roundtrips to achieve the same with javascript that you wouldn't need with server pages (Note how one of the GWT pagespeed optimizations is to dynamically generate the page initialization data using the webserver to avoid an initial roundtrip).

3) Pure static files lose you a lot of features. Comments, scores, ... none of that. That may or may not be acceptable.

1) You can have the kernel notify you upon a file system change via a watch descriptor. It's not rocket science, and you don't have to do any polling.

2) It might not buy you much (I disagree), but is hardly a disadvantage over any other approach where you'd want to send compressed http responses.

3) Let me get this straight; you're talking about the CPU data cache? It's not going to be the bottleneck in a scenario where you are basically pumping data into a socket. If it was, how would allocating a lot small buffers have an advantage over a single large allocation, if the data was the same in the end?

As for elephants...

1) It depends on the expected result. A page built on static files doesn't need to be static in any other sense.

2) I'm not sure why you think that dynamically generated "server pages" are different from static ones in this case. The GWT pagespeed optimizations you are talking about are not relevant to the discussion, since they are not inherent to either static/dynamic backends.

3) As far as I'm concerned, this is the only valid point you have brought to the discussion.

1) and the atime updates (I am saying this because apache does make sure it updates them, which runs them -at least- 1ms per file they serve, and yes they accumulate these accesses, but they still cause limits and slowness) ? Caching the file will, incidentally, make watch descriptors not work anymore for other apps.

2) so it's identical. Meaning it's not an advantage of static files.

3) Actually the cpu data cache is going to be the bottleneck when you have 2x10G going into a single server (because you're using 92%+ of your data bandwidth just pumping data into the network cards). Not writing (or reading) to/from memory when you don't absolutely have to is what's going to make the difference in speed. If you get to the point where you can expand templates and compress them without hitting main memory (not that hard in chips with 16M third level cache), it will make a huge difference.

And of course this is assuming it actually fits in physical memory. If templates fit, but expanded they don't, templates win hands down (so expanding per-user stats pages into static files, for example, is guaranteed to cost you more than it buys you).

Elephants.

1) true, but it's going to cost you in roundtrips

2) yes they are. The optimization states that you optimize by having an "initialize" call, to get all data you need to render the full user's page. Then the dynamic backend calls that function, stores the result at the bottom of the GWT serving page, and boom, you go from n roundtrips to 1. Since a roundtrip is going to cost you at least 80-90 ms in any case except a local LAN, this is one of those optimizations that if you don't have them, you can forget about having your page displayed in less than 400-500ms.

Dynamic serving gets a bad rap because people are doing 10 mysql queries to a database server (meaning a different physical machine) with explicitly disabled caching and then complaining that actually takes time ... it's ridiculous. Looking at some PHP code and the speed complaints on fora that accompany it, it feels like putting your grandmother's dead grandmother behind the wheel of a ferrari and complaining it doesn't move fast.

Having small programs generate data on cue is always going to be faster than reading the actual data. I don't get why this isn't obvious to everyone. Hell, it's how (and why) compression works.

1) You don't need to poll atime descriptors. Neither do you need to use watch descriptors (although I don't understand your argument about them). You just need a way to tell the server that you updated a page. It might have been a good point if we were discussing specific implementations.

2) Are you saying that it was a completely irrelevant thing to mention in your list of problems with generating static files to begin with? If so, I agree.

3) Whether you're right or wrong (I can't tell at this point, and I won't simply decide on either until there are numbers to prove it), you are arguing on the basis of very limited and somewhat unlikely scenarios. I could argue on the basis of having very complex templates and page logic to generate extremely small pages, but I don't since I realize that it's not very likely to happen.

Elephants again...

1) No. If your use case is such that your static page contains the same information what your dynamically generated equivalent would (and no one is arguing for using static pages if this isn't possible), you don't need additional round trips.

2) If all data you need to render to a page is static, you could easily go from one roundtrip to none.

Let's bring another animal into the room:

With static files, you can enjoy the luxuries of very expressive languages with slow runtimes to build your pages, without any performance impact on serving them. Generating dynamic pages in a way that will even come close to serving static files in terms of performance is going to mean spending more effort than is viable for most projects.

.... You're ignoring the fact that static pages ARE loaded (cached) in memory. You're ignoring the fact that server applications will have to usually hit a database to render pages.

This is a very basic proposition (static assets are served faster than dynamically rendered assets), and I'm seriously bewildered as to why you are arguing against that point.

With static files, it's easy to setup serving assets cached in memory. Since all files are static, expiring assets is also trivial. Also, setting up a CDN is super easy too (just a CNAME redirect).

Also of note: HN uses the filesystem as a database (ie static files).

This is the same sort of argument that functional languages keep making. It can work in certain manufactured examples, but in practice it falls on it's face because of the amount of data you need to keep track of, and the features you're throwing out are not optional for the vast majority of problems. Even then, doing this will blow up the data size by necessity and you'll lose time, first to cache trampling, then to virtual memory.

And frankly, the moment you hit virtual memory, you won't even get to 10 qps anymore without an SSD, and 100 with an SSD.

Static serving is a trivial optimization, and like all such things, it has huge qualifiers, and only works in the case it's intended for. It will only have a speed advantage in the obvious, simple case. As soon as you want to use any sort of dynamic element, extra round-trips will kill whatever advantage you thought you had. If you actually have large amounts of repeating elements (e.g. a table of some sort, article list, pagination, ... what have you), the extra memory usage will kill your advantage.

I have no idea what you're talking about. Functional languages are irrelevant to this conversation.

For 99% of personal blogs and a large number of "mom-and-pop" business sites, you'd be lucky to find >1000 individual webpages on their site, each less than 100kB in size. MMAP to your heart's content... 100MB can easily be kept permanently in memory.

None of those "dynamic" elements you mentioned are difficult to do statically: You render once using a template language by iterating through and rendering each page in your sitemap. This handles most "dynamic" content you mentioned: tables, tags, tagclouds, pagination, related posts, etc. Using Jekyll or Hyde, you're talking ~100ms per post -- or 1.5 minutes to render 1000 pages. (In fact, Hyde used to use Django under the hood to do the rendering!)

I can definitively say, it's a big win for most personal websites -- most dynamic elements can be done at "compile time", others are covered by 3rd party services using client-side JS (eg. Disqus for comments), and if you need any others you should switch to a dynamic site. Tom Preston-Werner (github CEO) agrees with me; that's why he developed Jekyll for github [1]. Github pages are hardly a "manufactured" example, and they do work well in practice.

[1] http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/11/17/blogging-like-a-hac...

Do you have any benchmarks to support your first assertion?

Not off hand. Hire me and I'll put together a convincing example with whatever qualifiers you want, and document the findings.