A fast-load­ing site is a good thing. Your site's speed mat­ter­s. Which is why cre­at­ing fast sites is one of Niko­la's de­sign goals.

Sure, it's not meant to cre­ate e-­com­merce sites, but if you are do­ing just a sim­ple cor­po­rate site, or a per­son­al blog, why would you not make it as fast as pos­si­ble any­way?

So, here's one da­ta point, from Kay Hayen

But you don't have to just be­lieve that graph. Here's Ya­hoo's YS­low re­port on this blog, which is host­ed in a $5 VPS (as are oth­er sites, BTW. The same VP­S. As is a bunch of ser­vices. And my Quas­sel core)

It scores 94 on that test. That's 94 out of 100 pos­si­ble points in the "S­mall Site or Blog" rule­set.

How much serv­er tun­ing was need­ed? I added one line to the Apache con­fig:

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css

That makes it com­press those files be­fore send­ing it to the us­er and im­proved the third item from F to A.

So, when I say Niko­la makes your site fast, don't take my word for it, just check it out.

I just re­leased ver­sion 3 of my stat­ic site gen­er­a­tor, Niko­la

It's a ma­jor re­lease, there is hard­ly any code from the pre­vi­ous ver­sion that was not moved, prod­ded, bro­ken or fixed!

The main fea­tures of Niko­la:

• Blogs, with tags, feed­s, archives, com­­ments, etc.

• Themable

• Fast build­s, thanks to doit

• Flex­i­ble

• Small code­base (pro­­gram­mers can un­der­­s­tand all of Niko­la in a few hours)

• re­Struc­­tured­­Text and Mark­­down as in­­put lan­guages

• Easy im­age gal­­leries (just drop files in a fold­er!)

• Syn­­tax high­­­light­ing for al­­most any pro­­gram­ming lan­guage or markup

• Mul­ti­lin­gual sites

• Does­n't rein­vent wheel­s, lev­er­ages ex­ist­ing tool­s.

Changes for this re­lease (not ex­haus­tive!):

• New op­­tion­al tem­­plate ar­gu­­ment for "niko­la init"

• New "in­stal­l_the­me" task

• Op­­tion­al ad­­dress op­­tion for the "serve" task

• Bet­ter look­ing code­blocks

• Rus­sian tran­s­la­­tion

• Use mark­­down/reSt com­pil­er based on post ex­ten­­sion

• Don't fail when there are no post­s/s­­to­ries/­­gal­­leries/­­tags

• Use con­­fig­u­ra­­tion op­­tions as de­pen­­den­­cies

• Use more rel­a­­tive links for eas­i­er site rel­lo­ca­­tion

• Syn­­tax high­­­light for mark­­down

• Bet­ter mul­ti­­core builds (make the -n 2 or -n 4 op­­tions work)

• Con­­fig­urable out­­put fold­er

• Don't fail on posts with pe­ri­ods in the name

• Dif­fer­­ent page names for dif­fer­­ent lan­guages

• Rec­og­nize (some) Mako tem­­plate de­pen­­den­­cies

• Is now a more "nor­­mal" python pack­­age.