Yeah, who doesn’t do a Hello World to test their new system out… Guilty as charged.

Nerd like futzing, and real nerds hate Wordpress. That’s really the only reason my site is now hosted with Octopress. It’s a slick setup using a static site generator from the Ruby/Github community (Jekyll), with some solid congifuration done for you.

It comes ‘blog aware’, which is more than many static site generators can say, and also boasts solid markup and a good theme to boot. Add to this that it requires the command line and white text on a black screen to run, and well, that put me over the edge.

The main reasoning behind generating your static files ahead of time is that you’re basically memoizing the work that something like Wordpress needs to do every pageload: parse the URL segments, route the request, query the data base (and join up to 40+ other queries in Wordpress’ case), template that into HTML… all that work for something that doesn’t change much.

What (could) change on this site are the comments and my Twitter feed, and both of those are loaded on the delay with javascript. This means that in a 10 pageload test my old WP blog averaged about a second and a half to fire the .ready() event, where the new one is ~120ms. My page doesn’t -need- to load fast, but now it does, which makes any nerd happy.

It also supports some great code insertion with the Solarized color scheme by default:

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   var foo = function(){}
  foo.prototype.init = function() {
      //init code here please
      console.log("initializing a foo object");
  }

Pretty dang slick.