[ale] Creating a website (semi-rant)

[Michael B. Trausch]

On 12/13/2011 09:11 AM, David Tomaschik wrote:
> Now, I'm not advocating WYSIWYG editors ala Dreamweaver, but I also
> think that hand coding is not a solution for even the small business
> level.  Content Management Systems let you structure content, manage
> access to content, update content, and keep content with a consistent
> look and feel.

For content that is mostly static, though, that's overkill; hitting a
database to serve up a site's primary landing page and such can make the
difference between your home page being up or not when your database
server is really busy.  If you're on some sort of shared hosting that
problem becomes somewhat unpredictable, so it's good to have at least
the common pages that aren't edited frequently be some sort of
relatively static content.

Of course, I realize that many sites aren't like that, and there are
solutions to the problem by using reverse proxies, multiple Web servers,
caching systems like memcached, and so forth, but for most things I've
done, it's easier to have the "front" pages for the site be nothing more
than templates that don't need to interact with a database.

It's something of a happy medium between 100% static pages and a CMS.

There is also the possibility of using something like m4 to generate a
lot of static .html pages from templates and inclusion directives, or a
dedicated tool for the job.  I know that there is at least one out there
that is designed to be used for publishing a blog and it will "compile"
the blog site to a bunch of static HTML files.  With something like PHP,
that's a great thing since now you go from re-evaluating the code on
every page hit (that is, if you run PHP without an opcode cache) to
probably just holding it in the server's filesystem cache, ready to be
returned in as long as it takes for the OS to pull data out of its
filesystem cache.

Or you could just use Emacs.  ;-)  After all, that's another good
compromise between hand-written code and having a CMS on the server do
it all for you.  You could just write a few LISP routines...

	--- Mike

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