Speeding up org-static-blog

Three years ago, I had enough of all the static site generators out there. Over the life of this blog, I had used Octopress, then Pelican, then Coleslaw, then org-mode, and then wrote my own static site generator, org-static-blog. Above all, org-static-blog is simple. It iterates over all *.org files in org-static-blog-posts-directory, and then exports all of these files to HTML. Simple is good. Simple is reliable. Simple means I can fix things.

However, simple can also mean inefficient. Most glaringly, org-static-blog exports every single blog post three times every time you publish: Once to render the HTML, then once to render the RSS feed, then once to render the Index and Archive pages.

Today, I finally tackled this problem: Now, org-static-blog only exports each post once, when the *.org file changes. The RSS feed, the Index page, and the Archive page simply read the already-rendered HTML instead of exporting again.

Thus, a full rebuild of this blog and all of its 85 posts used to take 2:12 min, and now takes 42 s. More importantly, if only one org file changed, the rebuild used to take 1:08 min, and now takes 1.5 s. Things like this are hugely satisfying to me!