Hello World (again)

2011-08-10

general

Welcome to my new homepage where I will blog a lot more than I did on my old page, I promise.

My blog posts will be about computers, programming, software, computer graphics and to some extent life in general :)

My first tip is the software that has actually created this page: nanoc.

nanoc (yes, it must be written with the first letter lower case) is a static site compiler. It works much like a compiler for a traditional programming - you give it a file of rules and it compiles your source code into a result.

But now, why would you want a static site in the 21st century?

The answer is efficiency. Since what you see here is only static pages, there is no code executed on the web server. This also gives better security - try to hack a static page ;). It also gives you more control since you have all the code for your web page, your articles are not laying around in some database at some third party web host.

nanoc is also very flexible and can be extended in a number of ways. For dynamic content, javascript can be used. I use Disqus for the ability to have comments and it is really nice! So, for a small to medium sized website it can be very suitable.

Other static site generators are for example Jekyll (written in Ruby as nanoc) and Hyde (written in Python).