My va­ca­tions end to­mor­row. So, the time to spend hack­ing fun, per­son­al, free stuff is go­ing to be lim­it­ed be­cause of the time spent cod­ing fun, free stuff for mon­ey. So, I de­cid­ed to fin­ish with a bit of whim­sy.

I im­ple­ment­ed a com­plete­ly clien­t-ren­dered, one-URL, dy­nam­ic blog. Which is ac­tu­al­ly to­tal­ly stat­ic.

In fac­t, that blog is this blog, just with a twist. If you go to this URL you will see what's ba­si­cal­ly this very site, with com­ments and ev­ery­thing as usu­al. But if you click on "Pre­vi­ous Post" ... well, it stays in the same page, even though it dis­plays a dif­fer­ent post :-)

The mag­ic is the new, ex­per­i­men­tal, dy­nam­ic task_­mus­tache plug­in for my stat­ic site gen­er­a­tor, Niko­la. which does the fol­low­ing:

1. Ren­ders post da­­ta as JSON files in­­stead of HTML

2. Cre­ates a HTML file that is re­al­­ly a mus­­tache.js tem­­plate

3. Cre­ates a HTML file with some bits of Javascript that loads the tem­­plate and the new­est post's da­­ta.

4. If you ac­cess that mus­­tache.html with a frag­­men­t, it us­es that to fetch JSON da­­ta and re­write it­­self.

And that's it. It ac­tu­al­ly loads fast, and re­gen­er­ates very fast, since it does much less than the re­al site. There are a bunch of things that will dump you out of the "dy­nam­ic" site, like tag links, and what­ev­er, but it works sur­pris­ing­ly well (and if you want to theme it, it's just one tem­plate).

This is the first of a new kind of thing for Nikola, the "extra plugins". Basically, stuff that is too weird, specific or useless for the general distro, will go there, and to use those plugins, you have to create a plugins/ folder in your site and add it there manually.

En­joy!