Wordpress was my first blog software. I used it since roundabout six years now. Writing an own plugin for my blog was one of my first steps learning PHP. After my experiences with Java 1.4 and MS Visual C++ 6.0 from 2002 until 2005 I came over to the web scripting area and got in touch with PHP. The new OOP features and the short round trip time I liked.
But nowadays I realize that Wordpress is extremely slow. I tried several tricks and tweaks to reduce the response time. But it was impossible to go under one second without jumping through hoops. I thought about the whole setup: Why should my blog render the whole stuff on each request? And the current version of Wordpress has a lot bloated stuff to do on each request. So I checked my requirements:
- I blog not that often
- I only update typos
- I don’t need WYSIWYG, editing Markdown files is comfortable enough
- I do not really need a comment feature
So I decided to use something way more simple than the known bloated full featured PHP blogs out in the wild: I’ve written a view lines of Ruby code which generates static HTML files from Markdown files. Each Markdown file is one blog post. Added some HTML and CSS and all of that stored into a GitHub Repo. On the server side there are only static files served, a crontab job pulls each hour the Git repo and runs the publish script which generates the static content. Voila, here it is my ultra fast Uberblog!