I baked a site

My most successful website, Moneyterms used to run on WordPress. I have found it linked to as an example of WordPress running something other than a blog. However things changed.

In future, only I will add content to the site, and I have even removed or replaced everything written by anyone else. I do not need a CMS to allow multiple editors.

Secondly, I am doing a print version of the site, and the easiest way to do this was to work from a Latex document that can then easily be exported to either form. Incidentally Latex is wonderful, but that is a subject for another post.

The HTML version is then processed by a TCL script to apply a template, add some links to related pages and create the index pages.

This means I now have a static site, rather than a dynamic one. This is sometimes called a baked site.

Together with a move to a faster server (a virtual linux server instead of a ordinary shared server) and fast server software (Lighttpd) the result is that the site is now very responsive. It is also more secure and easy to maintain.

The only problem is that updates that alter every page of the site (e.g. to the template) can take a minute or two to upload to the server, however as only one page is changed at a time this will rarely inconvenience users.