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Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Nanoc - Create a powerful static website with nanoc (From, Linux User)

I run my Web Site on a 400MHz P3 with about 360MB of Ram. It is setting under my Desk. I just run Apache in Caos Linux and it works great, for plain HTML Sites. But, I use to have several Dynamic Web Sites (when I used paid hosting). I haven't been able to configure SQL on it, so far. Caos wont run any GUI SQL Apps that I have found. So, it has to be done in the Command Line. I tried it, but just kept on getting error after error. And it would be too taxing on the system anyway. I think, nanoc, is worth trying out...

Don

Create a powerful static website with nanoc

by Koen Vervloesem

Forget Drupal, WordPress and Rails: nanoc compiles your documents into a static website

We’ve never really loved content management systems and blog platforms, because they force us to use mediocre tools: editing files in a crash-prone web browser, usually with some unusable WYSIWYG editor widget. And to deploy the website, we need to install PHP and MySQL on our web server, which can be hard to trust because of their dubious security track record. Why can’t this be done in a simpler way? Why can’t we just use a quality command- line editor like Vim to edit the webpages? And why does the result need to be a dynamic site if we only add pages to it daily and the rest of the content stays the same anyway?

Luckily, we’re not the only ones who think this way. Five years ago, Denis Defreyne created nanoc, a Ruby-based tool that runs on your own computer and compiles documents into a static website consisting of simple HTML files. You can then write these documents (in formats such as Markdown, Textile or HTML) in your own favorite editor, let nanoc compile them, and upload the result to your web server. As this web server just has to serve a bunch of static files, you don’t have to install PHP, MySQL, Ruby or Rails on it. So not only can you use a very lightweight virtual private server for your website, you have also less chance of being hacked into. Let’s take a look at how this works.