Ricardo Martins’s post (along with several similar ones) about switching to jekyll, a static generator in Rails. Even Jeff Atwood, a windows-centric developer, is a fan of Movable Type, a perl-written static generator blog engine.
The advantages of a static generator for blogs or more static websites are clear: reads are much faster and will help your website survive digg, hacker news and reddit. It will also ease on the CPU and Database.
This wiki runs on Django (source available), so to implement static generation it was clear I should use Jared Kuolt’s staticgenerator app. The documentation is pretty good but I found two small details I should point out.
First, my urls didn’t ended in /, so the generated files didn’t have an extension and weren’t properly served by apache (no mimetype, so html wasn’t processed). When I changed them, static generator considers them a folder, so adds a index.html inside it and it just works (although your WEB_ROOT gets full of junk).
The other problem is that the documentation only mentions nginx configuration, and I am using Passenger under Apache. Which is even more simple, you just have to point WEB_ROOT to the public folder under your project. You can see my settings-prod.py which has all those settings.
I don’t have any popular website under this machine, so I can’t see the results just yet, but I got to get my hands dirty.