Experimenting with static site generation

Hi!

If you visit this blog on a regular basis, which you probably don't, you may have noticed that it looks a bit different from how it used to look. The overall theme is the same, but the URLs look way different, and there is no comment section. So what happened?

A while ago, I wrote my own content management system in PHP, replacing WordPress. That was your standard CMS, for every request, you have a script (PHP script in this case) which generates the page dynamically, showing you the content you requested. March this year (2014) though, I started a new project, which works fundamentally different.

Enter jsSiteBuilder.

jsSiteBuilder is a static site generator. That means that nothing is built on the fly. There's a script which reads the content of a MySQL database and generates all the required HTML files for each and every page and post. Whenever a user requests the website, the one and only thing the web server ever does is what web servers do best - it fetches the file and sends it back to the user.

The most obvious advantage with this method is performance. Both server load and request time is brought down to the absolute minimum. It also provides some much needed stability. Your website doesn't go down, even in the case of an extreme disaster. Say you accidentally delete your MySQL database, or the database host goes down, or file permissions mess up. Usually, this would take down the website. With this CMS however, all html files will just stay there, available for everyone to see. Your users won't notice a thing, while you can take all the time you need to properly fix whatever issue appeared. You can even re-run the site building script as much as you like while everything is down; it won't delete anything.

Not everything with jsSiteBuilder is static however. More specifically, it has the admin control panel you'd expect from an old-fashioned dynamic site generator, like WordPress. That's because the admin panel is written in PHP. This makes it easy to create, edit, and generally administer and set up the website. All the admin interface does is to interact with the MySQL database. Once you're done making whatever changes you want to make, you can update the user-facing portion of the website with the push of a button. On my blog, with my server, completely regenerating the entire site takes no more than a few tenths of a second.