[ForHackernews]

" When I first read about that, it was impossible to believe. The site was saying that the blog works without data, which is essential for any blog."

What? There's never been any really good reason for blogs to be database-backed in the first place. Blogs are just static websites with new pages added frequently.

[bradleyland]

A blog has users coming from two directions.

Readers visit the blog and consume the content. The application needs to serve pages that, as you correctly observed, are added occasionally, but don't change much. For a simple blog, there isn't much need for anything other than a static page.

From the other end, is the author. Think of the blogging engine as an authoring tool. Just like any application, you can choose to use a tool that runs on your computer (e.g., Jekyll), or you can choose to use a tool that runs as a web app (like WordPress).

The lines are blurred here, because it's entirely possible to just run Jekyll on a web server, using ssh to shell in and edit your blog files. If you keep your blog files in a Git repository on Github, as many people do, you can even do fancy stuff like auto-build on commit hooks. Then you can use Github as your authoring environment, and just commit as usual.

I think your argument really stems from an architecture shortcoming in the way WordPress works by default. There is certainly never any good reason for a web page that changes infrequently to lack any form of caching. The real question is where you do that caching. Using something like CloudFare in front of your WordPress blog is just as valid a decision as is using something like Jekyll, or adding caching to WordPress through something like WP Super Cache.

[salehhamadeh]

It may be evident for you since you probably have seen many frameworks and implementations. Before hearing about Jekyll, I only used Blogger and WordPress, which relies on the database for almost everything.

[ForHackernews]

But that's only to provide a convenient admin interface for people who don't want to write posts in HTML (or markdown or whatever)

I guess what I'm saying is that (except for the comments) blogs are static pages that contain (mostly) unchanging content, not dynamic data that needs to be updated.

If you're curious about the history, you might look into MovableType, which predates WordPress by a couple years, and has always supported static page generation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_Type

[redwall_hp]

Once upon a time, Pyra Labs' Blogger was a tool that generated static pages and FTP'd them to your server. This was back in the heyday of Movable Type.

[microtonal]

I remember using ppwizard on OS/2 :):

http://dennisbareis.com/ppwizard.htm

Nowadays I am using Hakyll, it's a natural progression from Jekyll and is much easier to customize (it's basically a Haskell DSL for static site generation).