Back in the 90’s when the internet was going mainstream people used to actually write their web pages in HTML.

It didn’t take them long to figure out that, if you have multiple pages, there were certain parts that they would share.

Changing these parts for all the pages was painfull. At first they figured out a way to generate the pages by keeping the common parts in just one place and insert only the parts that were changing for all the pages. Dynamic pages were being born. Many ways of dynamically generating a page were invented.

Nowadays, for a relatively small blog, Wordpress (or a similar publishing platform) is the way to go. While it has its advantages, it also has some major drawbacks:

• you need a database to power the blog
• the pages are generated on the fly (Wordpress in written in PHP) so there is the additional time overhead of that
• you need to install security updates almost imediatelly as they appear
• you need to be carefull when backing up

Advantage: the convenience of using it is a big plus, and the reason Wordpress is so popular.

Now, if Wordpress is too mainstream for you and makes you look uncool it’s time to go back to the root (of the internet) an make your blog consist of only static html pages. At this point you will probably ask yourself: are you insane? Well, not really.

An interesting solution for generating static pages is Jekyll It’s what powers GitHub Pages, GitHub being that wonderful place on the internetz with the largest programming hipsterz per square-feet number :)

Now, if you don’t feel like writing your own logic and css styles for using Jekyll, somebody already did a pretty decent job. I give you you: Octopress

Once you:

• figure out how to export your current Wordpress blog into a format the Octopress/Jekyll can understand
• fix the crap that the exporter managed to export
• add support for tags
• add support for youtube brackets (basically what the wordpress plugin did)
• figure out how to enable comments via Disqus
• customize the theme so that your blog doesn’t look like 95% of all the blogs that use Octopress
• run the generator & copy the static pages over to the server

You are done.

The result: decent and extremly fast (static pages ftw). All the disadvantages of Wordpress are gone. The process of writing and publishing new content is a bit more complicated but that doesn’t really bother me. You can als get a bit more crazy with the transformations you do to your blog’s content by writing a couple of scripts