Nowadays, commenting is considered a must for a blog. If you have a blog that does not allow your precious readers to present their thoughts, you must be so ashamed of yourself to claim that it is a blog. Well, I am not exception. But this is a static blog site. Except a bunch of well formatted html files, my site has no database server, no Ruby on Rails, no C#, no anything that can provide the necessary facility to implement the dynamic commenting system.
What should I do?
Disqus comes to the rescue. Disqus is one of the commenting system based on Javascript technology. To use it, you simply go to Disqus’s website, register an account, put one line of Javascript code into your static html page. Then you’re done. It’s that simple.
James Blog
Just imagine that your blog is getting popular, redditted, dugg, or slashdotted, traffic that you’ve been waiting for months or years suddenly becomes so aplenty, or actually overwhelming. Your shared hosted blog site is causing so much trouble to the miserable already overcrowded server, that the host shut your site down, or suggest that you upgrade to their more expensive plan that enables you own your dedicated server. Your site is embarrassingly down for days, while you are working hard at the upgrading. After you’re done, the traffic is gone. Then you stuck at the expensive plan that has very little use.
Enter Rassmalog—a static blogging software that can generate htmls for all you blog entries. The setup is straightforward. You buy a vps (Xen VPS recommended), install your favorite Linux distribution, install a lightweight web server (NGinx or Lighttpd is suggested). Install RassmaLog onto your desktop at home, then
rake new
to create your first post. To be honest, the YAML format RassmaLog uses DOES need a bit time to get used to. But don’t worry, it’s not big deal.
rake gen
to generate the htmls and to upload them to your host, you execute
rake upload
You are done and ready to rock! With NGinx (what I choose)’s horse power, you can handle spiky traffic from Slashdot, Reddit, Yahoo, Digg all together.
The only caveat is that you have to outsource the commenting system to external sites such as Disqus.
James Blog, Ruby
Having followed a few blogs for more than two years, I finally made up my mind to have my own. I do not expect it to be as popular as codinghorror, but a memo to keep record of some random thoughts.
James Blog Misc