Entries tagged 'Aaron Swartz'

In Chris Ferdinandi’s article about different static site generators (SSGs), he says that they “store content in flat markdown files instead of a database” and that immediately brought to mind “Bake, Don’t Fry,” a blog post from 2002 by Aaron Swartz where he started exploring the concept of baked sites as compared to fried sites.

At the time, you had blogging systems like Blogger and Movable Type that stored their data in a database but generated static pages for viewing, and systems like b2/cafelog (this was pre-WordPress) and OpenACS that stored their data in a database but generated pages on the fly. The first blogging system that I remember that just used the file system to store all of its files was blosxom.

I started this blog on Blogger but quickly switched over to a homegrown PHP/MySQL system in October 2000. I have rewritten it from scratch once or twice since then.

I have been thinking about moving to a setup that baked and published a static version of my site. A reason I haven’t done it is because doing it all fried hasn’t been a performance problem so far.

I’m not convinced that I want all of the content in flat files and not a database. I guess I just don’t see the advantages of working with flat files for how I like to write, and I can’t imagine expecting less technical users deal with things like text files with front-matter and tools to manage those files.

It is strange that all of the popular static-site generators I’ve looked at have filesystem storage baked into their design. It should be rather straightforward to abstract that out a bit, and then you’d be able to pull your content from a database but generate static output. Like Blogger did twenty-five years ago.