From CMS To HTML

As your can see for yourself I’ve rebuilt the site, again. I’ve code named this new iteration Alpe d’Huez, but it’s really version 8.

So NxFIFTEEN Alpe d’Huez, what’s the point? I’ve washed my hands of CMS installations. I started blogging almost from day one and used WordPress 1.0 then at some point switched to Drupal 5. The thing is, this site is so parse on content the over head of dynamically building pages for every visit isn’t required.

Over the years the requirements from my hosting provider has been steadily creeping up to get better and better performance from the site. At its worst, just part weekend, my Drupal home page took almost 80 seconds to load. That’s after implementing varnish and boost. For a site I update infrequently at best static HTML is perfect, so that’s what I went out to produce.

A long story short I’ve decided to use hexo.io which is a NodeJS static site generator. It works by combining markdown flavoured text file and a ejs tagged template file into static HTML that can then be distributed anyway that makes sense to you. The biggest advantage here for me, is since everything is now static it can all kept and managed with Git. Plus since I separated the source code and markdown files into two repositories I can also keep a copy of the content on my phone without without the rest of the JavaScript

Possibly the biggest reason for looking at a Node.js solution was that is not written in PHP. I’m not against PHP like some, it’s a language I’ve been using since 1998 and it’s always served me well, but it’s time I learnt something new and node.js is really not just now.

So that’s my introduction to NxFIFTEEN. As you can imagine the transition took time and there were a lot of obstacles to surmounted but I’ll save them for other posts.