Rants 'N Musings is back, now running on a completely new platform. Formerly, Rants 'N Musings was based on Drupal 6 running on a Linux platform based on Amazon's EC2. The instance was costing me about $80 per month, and required quite a bit of attention.

While Linux systems themselves tend to require very minimal attention, and there is always some degree of routine maintenance. Backups, security patches, and minor adaptive configuration changes are all the minimum baseline maintenance required for any operating system.

Drupal, on the otherhand has proven to be quite a bear to maintain. While I still believe Drupal to be one of the best content management platforms available, the cost as measured by my time, of maintaining it for an individual running a simple blog, at least for me, is way to high.

I considered, briefly, migrating to Blogger or WordPress, but during the decision process, I came across a number of static blog generators (Jekyll, Pelican, Blosxom, Octopress, and Mynt). The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Originally, blogs were written as collections of HTML pages, and published. Early dedicated blogging programs also produced static HTML pages. One would write, generate, and upload to their webserver.

Later on, more sophisticated programs, ranging from simple dedicated blog engines to full-blown sophisticated content management systems became the norm. Most of the most popular blog engines are available as SaaS implementations. Many are also available as software you can host yourself.

The static generators, although they are much less sophisticated than most of the blog and content-management systems out there, have a number of appeals. Static websites are much more secure than any content-management system. They also tend to be faster as generating pages through a heavyweight system such as Drupal requires quite a bit more processing power and time.

There's also something to be said for the way it feels. Composition is done in a markdown editor. It's simple. Generation is done by running a python program from the command line. It's simple. It just feels good.

Hosting static webpages is cheap or even free. Traditional website hosting companies range from a few bucks to a few tens of bucks per month. Amazon's S3 can be used at a very low price. Free options exist too, such as hosting pages with Google, Github:pages, or even Dropbox.

Mynt stood out for me as being a work of very simple elegance. It's got enough power to do exactly what I want, without being overly complicated or heavy-weight. It provides a template driven approach to generating static pages. Though use of creative css and HTML layout, I was able to sufficiently reproduce the look and feel of my blog as it looked running on Drupal - without all of the maintenance and expense of hosting.