This fea­ture for Niko­la was im­ple­ment­ed by @amok­leben, and now, if you ask twit­ter your site can have it too.

What are Twit­ter Card­s? Did you no­tice that for some sites, when you click on tweets that have links, you get a small pre­view of the con­tent? Well, that's a twit­ter card.

This still needs a lit­tle im­prove­ment to sup­port the rich­er "me­di­a" card­s, but it does work:

You don't have to do any­thing in your site, but set­ting the "de­scrip­tion" meta­da­ta to your posts helps make this more ac­cu­rate (and it al­so works for google+)

I am thrilled to an­nounce the re­lease of ver­sion 5.4 of Niko­la, a stat­ic site/blog gen­er­a­tor

Here's the (in­com­plete!) changel­og for this re­lease [1]:

One of the most fre­quent ques­tions I get about Niko­la is "but how do I cre­ate a site that's not a blog?". And of course, that's be­cause the doc­u­men­ta­tion is heav­i­ly blog-ori­ent­ed. This doc­u­ment will change that ;-)

Since it start­ed, Niko­la has had the ca­pa­bil­i­ties to cre­ate gener­ic sites. For ex­am­ple, Niko­la's own site is a fair­ly gener­ic one. Let's go step by step on how you can do some­thing like that.

As usual when starting a nikola site, you start with nikola init which creates a empty semi-configured site:

$ nikola init mysite
Created empty site at mysite.

Then we go into the new mysite folder, and make the needed changes in the conf.py configuration file:

##############################################
# Configuration, please edit
##############################################


# Data about this site
BLOG_AUTHOR = "Roberto Alsina"
BLOG_TITLE = "Not a Blog"
# This is the main URL for your site. It will be used
# in a prominent link
SITE_URL = "http://notablog.ralsina.me"
BLOG_EMAIL = "ralsina@kde.org"
BLOG_DESCRIPTION = "This is a demo site (not a blog) for Nikola."

#
# Some things in the middle you don't really need to change...
#

post_pages = (
    ("pages/*.txt", "", "story.tmpl", False),
)

And now we are ready to cre­ate our first page:

$ nikola new_post -p
Creating New Post
-----------------

Enter title: index
Your post's text is at:  pages/index.txt

We can now build and pre­view our site:

$ nikola build
Scanning posts.done!
.  render_site:output/categories/index.html
.  render_sources:output/index.txt
.  render_rss:output/rss.xml
:
:
: [Much more of the same]

$ nikola serve
Serving HTTP on 127.0.0.1 port 8000 ...

And you can see your (very emp­ty) site in http://lo­cal­host:8000

So, what's in that pages/index.txt file?

.. title: index
.. slug: index
.. date: 2013/03/01 10:26:17
.. tags:
.. link:
.. description:


Write your post here.

Title is the page title, slug is the name of the generated HTML file (in this case it would be index.html) the date doesn't matter much in not-blogs, same for tags and link. Description is useful for SEO purposes if you care for that.

And be­low, the con­tent. By de­fault you are ex­pect­ed to use re­Struc­tured text but Niko­la sup­ports a ton of for­mat­s, in­clud­ing Mark­down, plain HTM­L, BB­Code, Wik­i, and Tex­tile.

So, let's give the page a nicer ti­tle, and some fake con­tent. Since the de­fault Niko­la theme (called "site") is based on boot­strap you can use any­thing you like from it:

.. title: Welcome To The Fake Site
.. slug: index
.. date: 2013/03/01 10:26:17
.. tags:
.. link:
.. description: Fake Site version 1, welcome page!


.. class:: hero-unit span6

.. admonition:: This is a Fake Site

    It pretends to be about things, but is really just an example.
    So, don't click this button, it leads nowhere.

    .. class:: btn

    Click Me!


.. class:: span5

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Mauris non nunc turpis.
Phasellus a ullamcorper leo. Sed fringilla dapibus orci eu ornare. Quisque
gravida quam a mi dignissim consequat. Morbi sed iaculis mi. Vivamus ultrices
mattis euismod. Mauris aliquet magna eget mauris volutpat a egestas leo rhoncus.
In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Ut sed mi arcu. Nullam id massa eu orci
convallis accumsan. Nunc faucibus sodales justo ac ornare. In eu congue eros.
Pellentesque iaculis risus urna. Proin est lorem, scelerisque non elementum at,
semper vel velit. Phasellus consectetur orci vel tortor tempus imperdiet. Class
aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos
himenaeos.

[And more in the same vein]

And that's it. You will want to change the SIDEBAR_LINKS option to create a reasonable "menu" for your site, you will want to hack the theme (check nikola help bootswatch_theme for a quick & dirty solution), and you may want to add a blog later on, for company news or whatever.

You can see the fin­ished site in http://no­tablog.ralsi­na.me and its full con­fig­u­ra­tion in //ralsi­na.me/list­ings/no­tablog/­con­f.py.html

I hope this was help­ful!

Niko­la gen­er­ates stat­ic sites, so load test­ing it is not very in­ter­est­ing, ex­cept as a bench­mark for the dif­fer­ence be­tween stat­ic and dy­nam­ic sites.

To­day I was told about blitz.io and since a quick test is free, I thought, why not? The re­sult is quite im­pres­sive: a cheap VP­S, us­ing gatling as a web server, which is al­most con­fig­u­ra­tion-free and not meant for ex­treme­ly high load­s, can han­dle rough­ly 9 mil­lion dai­ly hit­s.

Let me say that again: 9 mil­lion hits. On a un­con­fig­ured $5 serv­er. Here's the re­port

How much tun­ing does it take for a word­press in­stance to serve that? On what hard­ware?

And that's on­ly half the pic­ture. Not on­ly are Niko­la's stat­ic pages in­cred­i­bly light on your server, we have al­so spent a lot of ef­fort try­ing to make in­di­vid­u­al pages load fast, for a bet­ter us­er ex­pe­ri­ence. Some of the tech­niques used for fast-load­ing sites are:

• Us­ing we­bas­sets to bun­­dle CSS and JS in­­­to sin­­gle files.

• Au­­to­­mat­ic sup­­port for CDNs for the com­­mon JS li­braries

• Sup­­port for tran­s­­par­en­t­­ly us­ing HT­M­L/C­SS/JS/Im­age com­pres­­sion tools

So, if you try some­thing like YS­low! on a Niko­la site, it will give you a score of rough­ly 93 up to 98 (out of 100) de­pend­ing on your web­serv­er con­fig­u­ra­tion.

BTW: I re­al­ly want to get that up to 100. Re­al­ly want it

So, re­mem­ber, if your site can be served stat­i­cal­ly, it's go­ing to be cheap­er, faster, safer. And if you ev­er get 9 mil­lion hits a day, it will be avail­able.

Disclaimer:

Blitz.io is send­ing me a t-shirt ;-)

Tim van der Lin­den has writ­ten a im­pres­sive tu­to­ri­al about how he used Niko­la to cre­ate his new site shisaa.jp

It doc­u­ments the whole process from scratch, start­ing by down­load­ing Niko­la up to build­ing your own theme.

Even if you are al­ready us­ing Niko­la you may find some new stuff there, so take a read (al­so, his theme is so pret­ty :-)