One of the best projects I've ever worked on was creating a large scale web site publishing system that was almost entirely static. A large team of very talented creatives made the art work, writers penned the content, and designers generated templates. All assets were controlled in a database. Then all that was extracted, after applying many different filters, to a static site that was uploaded via ftp to dozens of web servers. It worked great. Reliable, fast, cheap, and simple. Updates were a bit of a pain as it required pushing a lot of files to a lot of servers, and that took time, but otherwise a solid system.
Alas, this elegant system was replaced with a new fangled dynamic database based system. Content was pulled from a database using a dynamic language generated front-end. With a recent series of posts from Amazon's Werner Vogels, chronicling his experience of transforming his All Things Distributed blog into a static site using S3's ability to serve web pages, I get the pleasure of asking: are we back to static sites again?
It's a pleasure to ask the question because in many ways a completely static site is the holly grail of content heavy sites. A static site is one in which files (html, images, sound, movies, etc) sit in a filesystem and a web server directly translates a URL to a file that is directly reads the file from the file system and spits it out to the browser via a HTTP request. Not much can go wrong in this path. Not much going wrong is a virtue. It means you don't need to worry about things. It will just work. And it will just keep on working over time, bit rot hits program and service heavy sites a lot harder than static sites.
Here's how Werner makes his site static:
The articles describing his journey are: New AWS feature: Run your website from Amazon S3, Free at Last - A Fully Self-Sustained Blog Running in Amazon S3, and No Server Required - Jekyll & Amazon S3.
Using DropBox is the clever bit here for me. DropBox makes it so the files follow you so you can edit them on any of your machines. This is also the downside of the approach. You need a local machine with a complete tool set, which is a pain. Ironically, that is why I prefer cloud based approaches. I want to run a blog from any web enabled device, like an iPhone or an iPad, I don't want to mess with programs.
Static sites are scalable sites. The web server or OS can easily cache popular pages in memory and serve them like mint juleps at the Kentucky Derby. If a single server is overwhelmed then a static site can easily be served out of a CDN or replicated out to a load balanced configuration. For this reason static sites are fast. If you use a distributed file system underneath then you can even avoid the problem of a slow disk becoming the hot spot.
Content is editable with your favorite text editor. Nice and simple.
Filesystems tend to be reliable. Using S3 is even more reliable and cheap too. If there is a failure you can just republish or restore your site with a simple command. Databases tend to spike memory, fill up tables, hit slow queries, and have a myriad of other annoying failure modes. All that can be skipped in a static site. Web servers that go much beyond simple file serving can also act the diva.
The problem with static sites is that they are, well, static. Once the Internet was entirely static, except for the blink tag and animated gifs of course. Then CGI changed all that and the web has never sat still since.
So what we do is outsource all the dynamic bits to services and leave the content static. Comments can be handled by a service like Disqus. Search can be handled by Bing. Ad serving is already a service. Like buttons are all bits of includible javascript. And security concerns (hacking, SQL Injection, etc) are blissfully minimized. This is the mashup culture.
And it mostly works. I seriously considered this approach when I had to move HighScalability off shared hosting.
Some of the downsides:
The big downside for me was:
For building a static website S3 is not the only game in town. Github can also be used to host a static website. A blog can be generated and updated with a simple git push. This reduces the required set of installed programs to a more manageable level. Now you don't even need git. You can edit files directly using their web interface. The way it works is Github will automatically build your website every time you push changes to the repository. More details here:GitHub Pages, Publishing a Blog with GitHub Pages and Jekyll, and Github as a CDN.
Google App Engine is also an alternative for a static site. More details at: DryDrop, manage static web site with GAE and Github.
Now there's a bit of push to move blogs over to social networking sites like Google+. The advantage is you have a built in mechanism for attracting more readers, great discussion features, increased possibility of engagement, no cost, excellent device availability, and no maintenance worries. For blogs that don't need to monetize this is an excellent option. Though I do worry about what happens when you want to hop on to the next trendy social network and all the old content is simply dust.
Wrapping up:
So more links on creating static web sites: