Just to follow up to myself...<br><br>I'd like to clarify that I fully support the idea of generating static files as much as possible. It's good for performance, but it's also very good for security in that it reduces the attack surface significantly - for simple sites, it can be eliminated entirely by putting all the dynamic processing behind very strict access controls.<br>
<br>Hacking a static web-site is pretty darn near impossible, these days. If you want a zero-admin system, secure by default should be one of the goals.<br><br>I just don't think that we need to worry about performance or bandwidth much, when it comes to blogs. :-)<br>
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">2011/3/18 Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:bre@pagekite.net">bre@pagekite.net</a>></span><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
I may be old fashioned, but I tend to think that blogging is a pretty important application, especially if it can be done with fine grained access control - in many respects blogging + access controls + simple RSS subscription would cover 90% of what people are using walled gardens like Facebook for. Add easy photo albums to the mix, and you're 95% of the way there, feature-wise (network effects and usability do imply feature parity isn't enough though).<br>
<br>I think that the idea of pushing static files to a remote server, although a neat idea, is probably unnecessary.<br><br>I ran a friends-and-family hosting service for years, hosting a few dozen blogs, some on Movable Type, some using static files, some using Wordpress, some home grown... all using inefficient setups without caching or pre-loading or really any best practices (I was using cgiwrap to run each person's blog under a separate UID, valuing security over performance), over a 512Kbit upstream DSL line, using a 1GHz AMD Athlon XP and 512MB of RAM.<br>
<br>And it worked just fine, nobody complained about performance, ever.<br><br>Of course, none of us got slashdotted, but let's face it, most personal sites never, ever see that kind of traffic. A 512K up-stream DSL line can serve one 64Kbyte page every single second - 3600 hits per hour. That's *lots* of traffic for a blog. I'd venture that none of us have that many friends. :-)<br>
<br>Pro bloggers who expect large volumes of traffic from random strangers will want to rent infrastructure in the cloud anyway. Their communication is also by nature impersonal and non-private, so the FreedomBox has little to offer them.<br>
<br>The FreedomBox has quite a lot to offer people who are blogging for friends or family about daily life, family, health, children, relationships... all the little private things we would like to keep close to home, but still want to talk to our loved ones about.<br clear="all">
<font color="#888888">
<br>-- <br>Bjarni R. Einarsson<br>The Beanstalks Project ehf.<br><br>Making personal web-pages fly: <a href="http://pagekite.net/" target="_blank">http://pagekite.net/</a><br>
</font></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Bjarni R. Einarsson<br>The Beanstalks Project ehf.<br><br>Making personal web-pages fly: <a href="http://pagekite.net/" target="_blank">http://pagekite.net/</a><br>