A Plea for Baked Weblogs

Brent Simmons:

And so, even in the year 2011, if your weblog gets Fireballed, there’s a good chance it won’t be able to handle it. That seems crazy. It’s not 1997 — it’s 2011.

It freaks me out that this is still an issue. Or, worse — sometimes it pisses me off a little, when I want to read something and I can’t. […]

I think the new technique web developers — or weblog developers, at least — ought to learn is static rendering: writing files to disk rather than building from a database on every request.

That’s how DF itself works — and has always worked — thanks to Movable Type’s default static publishing mode. I do run on a higher-end server today (thanks, Joyent), but software-wise, DF works exactly the same today as it did back in 2002, when it was serving 100 page views a day.

★ Friday, 18 March 2011