¿Quién vigila a los vigilantes?
Spanish only post. You can read it here
Spanish only post. You can read it here
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One of the most frequent questions I get about Nikola is "but how do I create a site that's not a blog?". And of course, that's because the documentation is heavily blog-oriented. This document will change that ;-)
Since it started, Nikola has had the capabilities to create generic sites. For example, Nikola's own site is a fairly generic one. Let's go step by step on how you can do something like that.
As usual when starting a nikola site, you start with nikola init
which creates a
empty semi-configured site:
$ nikola init mysite Created empty site at mysite.
Then we go into the new mysite
folder, and make the needed changes in the conf.py
configuration file:
############################################## # Configuration, please edit ############################################## # Data about this site BLOG_AUTHOR = "Roberto Alsina" BLOG_TITLE = "Not a Blog" # This is the main URL for your site. It will be used # in a prominent link SITE_URL = "http://notablog.ralsina.me" BLOG_EMAIL = "ralsina@kde.org" BLOG_DESCRIPTION = "This is a demo site (not a blog) for Nikola." # # Some things in the middle you don't really need to change... # post_pages = ( ("pages/*.txt", "", "story.tmpl", False), )
And now we are ready to create our first page:
$ nikola new_post -p Creating New Post ----------------- Enter title: index Your post's text is at: pages/index.txt
We can now build and preview our site:
$ nikola build Scanning posts.done! . render_site:output/categories/index.html . render_sources:output/index.txt . render_rss:output/rss.xml : : : [Much more of the same] $ nikola serve Serving HTTP on 127.0.0.1 port 8000 ...
And you can see your (very empty) site in http://localhost:8000
So, what's in that pages/index.txt
file?
.. title: index .. slug: index .. date: 2013/03/01 10:26:17 .. tags: .. link: .. description: Write your post here.
Title is the page title, slug is the name of the generated HTML file
(in this case it would be index.html
) the date doesn't matter much in
not-blogs, same for tags and link. Description is useful for SEO purposes
if you care for that.
And below, the content. By default you are expected to use reStructured text but Nikola supports a ton of formats, including Markdown, plain HTML, BBCode, Wiki, and Textile.
So, let's give the page a nicer title, and some fake content. Since the default Nikola theme (called "site") is based on bootstrap you can use anything you like from it:
.. title: Welcome To The Fake Site .. slug: index .. date: 2013/03/01 10:26:17 .. tags: .. link: .. description: Fake Site version 1, welcome page! .. class:: hero-unit span6 .. admonition:: This is a Fake Site It pretends to be about things, but is really just an example. So, don't click this button, it leads nowhere. .. class:: btn Click Me! .. class:: span5 Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Mauris non nunc turpis. Phasellus a ullamcorper leo. Sed fringilla dapibus orci eu ornare. Quisque gravida quam a mi dignissim consequat. Morbi sed iaculis mi. Vivamus ultrices mattis euismod. Mauris aliquet magna eget mauris volutpat a egestas leo rhoncus. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Ut sed mi arcu. Nullam id massa eu orci convallis accumsan. Nunc faucibus sodales justo ac ornare. In eu congue eros. Pellentesque iaculis risus urna. Proin est lorem, scelerisque non elementum at, semper vel velit. Phasellus consectetur orci vel tortor tempus imperdiet. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos. [And more in the same vein]
And that's it. You will want to change the SIDEBAR_LINKS option to create a reasonable
"menu" for your site, you will want to hack the theme (check nikola help bootswatch_theme
for a quick & dirty solution), and you may want to add a blog later on, for company news
or whatever.
You can see the finished site in http://notablog.ralsina.me and its full configuration in //ralsina.me/listings/notablog/conf.py.html
I hope this was helpful!
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Review:Reminded me of Year Zero, which is a very good thing. |
Nikola generates static sites, so load testing it is not very interesting, except as a benchmark for the difference between static and dynamic sites.
Today I was told about blitz.io and since a quick test is free, I thought, why not? The result is quite impressive: a cheap VPS, using gatling as a web server, which is almost configuration-free and not meant for extremely high loads, can handle roughly 9 million daily hits.
Let me say that again: 9 million hits. On a unconfigured $5 server. Here's the report
How much tuning does it take for a wordpress instance to serve that? On what hardware?
And that's only half the picture. Not only are Nikola's static pages incredibly light on your server, we have also spent a lot of effort trying to make individual pages load fast, for a better user experience. Some of the techniques used for fast-loading sites are:
Using webassets to bundle CSS and JS into single files.
Automatic support for CDNs for the common JS libraries
Support for transparently using HTML/CSS/JS/Image compression tools
So, if you try something like YSlow! on a Nikola site, it will give you a score of roughly 93 up to 98 (out of 100) depending on your webserver configuration.
BTW: I really want to get that up to 100. Really want it
So, remember, if your site can be served statically, it's going to be cheaper, faster, safer. And if you ever get 9 million hits a day, it will be available.
Blitz.io is sending me a t-shirt ;-)