Hacker News Reader

Comment by singular | Hacker News Reader

With aggressive disk caching on servers static files are probably near enough in-memory anyhow (+ I'm sure you could configure a modern web server application to cache anyhow), so yeah it's probably pretty fast.

However it's more limiting to simply serve static files - you're limited to what you've generated. With redis you can serve it as json data and use it dynamically for e.g. search or showing all articles with a given tag, in a given date range, etc.

Additionally, I'm not a big fan of a whole bunch of static files sat in a folder somewhere that needs to be regenerated every time I change something. Personal preference, perhaps :-)

View on HN

If you're generating static HTML, why not generate static JSON? Then you can use it for client-side search, for example.

Check out my website's repo: https://bitbucket.org/devlinzed/devlinzed.com/src. It has a JSON format for just about every URL, but is still entirely static:

http://devlinzed.com/2013/may/keeping-all-your-data-safe

http://devlinzed.com/2013/may/keeping-all-your-data-safe.jso...

Your site loads very quickly. (PageSpeed Score is 97 out of 100 -- only suggestions are for the gravatar.)

Would you care to reveal a little more about where/how you host your site?

I host it in DigitalOcean's New York datacenter (on a 512 MB VPS). They're pretty alright, but any VPS would do the trick. In fact, I only use a VPS because I can't properly set caching or gzip headers on GitHub pages.

As far as I know, the only thing that I do that most static sites don't is precompile gzip files for HTML pages, and minify pretty much everything (including HTML and images.) PageSpeed, Pingdom and RedBot were very helpful for providing web server optimizations. I would just observe and implement every tweak they mentioned; there's a lot you can do managing your own server that you can't with AWS or GitHub.

And make that 100/100. :)

I love how crazy fast your site is on my slow browser (chrome on iOS seems to drag when you've got 100+ tabs). I'm starting a blog network as a side project and setting it up as Jekyll for exactly this kind of performance.

Also love the honest assessment that in your repo's description that your setup is "far more neckbeard and far more work" :)

Interesting. It's still useful to have the data in REDIS so you can easily search through data server-side, but of course that could simply load from static JSON if + when REDIS is restarted/new data is added.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com