How to build a news app that never goes down and costs you practically nothing

Re:How to build a news app that never goes down and costs yo... by andrewmunsell on Monday February 25, 2013 @12:10PM (#5280031)

It's interesting to see a site like NPR handle a site deploy like this. I've seen blog owners start to consider switching to a static website, but news sites are definitely a bit more difficult to maintain like this.

Personally, I use Jekyll on my own blog in a similar manner (http://andrewmunsell.com/).

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I also wrote a tutorial (http://www.andrewmunsell.com/tutorials/jekyll-by-example/) about using Jekyll, in case you want to try something similar to what NPR did, but with a different platform.

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Re:How to build a news app that never goes down and costs yo... by whimsicality on Tuesday February 26, 2013 @09:34AM (#5285748)

It's worth noting that our main news site, npr.org, is not all served from flat files. This is specific to our news applications team (apps.npr.org) and our client-side projects.

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Re:How to build a news app that never goes down and costs yo... by andrewmunsell on Wednesday February 27, 2013 @03:06PM (#5294537)

Which does make sense, since it's a constantly updated site-- regenerating all of the files (to update "what's new" lists and such) each time an article is written would be major overkill.

While I'm sure you guys already do this, proper caching can have a similar effect to a completely static site in terms of performance.

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Re:How to build a news app that never goes down and costs yo... by tomgp on Tuesday February 26, 2013 @10:35AM (#5286152)

The BBC News website is entirely flat files. Though the newer responsive/mobile version isn't.

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