Brent Simmons has built a new weblog CMS which exists entirely on his client computer, and outputs hard-coded HTML files to his webserver.
I’m trying to think of an analogy for non-programmers… this is like… building a space shuttle with polished, hand-carved rainforest hardwood. No, it’s nothing like that. But it’s just as elegant and crazy.
A dirty secret of web devs is that if your site is being slashdotted (or “dugg” or whatever we’re calling it today), the best way to keep the tap flowing is to slip in and replace the linked fancy, expensive dynamically-generated page with a dumb hard-coded version. Simmons has taken this philosophy and built an entire CMS on it. One could run Amazonian, nearly Googlian levels of traffic off the wimpiest server this way. I think this has occurred to most of us at one time or another, but in the end we never take it seriously. Why not?
