I’m sure you’ve heard of static site generators like Jekyll (Ruby) or Hyde (Python). The benefits are obvious - your site is hosted on a cheap shared hosting and it can easily survive the Digg/Slashdot/Reddit effect. There is no database latency - the browser requests a file on the server and gets it back immediately.

Update (2011-02-27):

While I still use a static generator to power my site, it’s not a different engine. I got tired of launching a django server just to write a post. I wrote a new static site generator called Socrates. Each post is now a separate file written in Markdown. Socrates then runs through those files and creates a site for me. I’m still using django templates. What follows is the original post.

django

The site is a simple django blog. There is nothing really of note when it comes to django-specific coding. I run the django server locally when I’m editing or adding articles. It provides a nice UI. It also lets me easily preview the site without generating anything.

static generator

When I’m happy with the state of the website and want to publish it, I run the static generator. It’s contained in the generate.py file. It runs through all possible urls and for each one it generates a static file. Each file is a complete HTML page that the user’s browser will download. The folder structure is as follows:

/2010/
    /02/
        post-one.html
        post-two.html
/2011/
    ..
        ..
/about/
    index.html
index.html
/page/
    /2/
        index.html
/category/
    /android/
        index.html
    /code/
        index.html
    ..

You get the idea. This way, with an .htaccess file we can have the following URL structure:

/2010/02/post-one/

FTP deploy script

And the final piece is the deploy.py script. It looks at the deploy directory, and with a little help from git, it figures out what files were changed since the last deploy. It then takes those files and throws them up on the server. A normal shared hosting.

Conclusion

You can check out the code on Github.