Faster publishing in Micro.blog

Last week I parked myself at a coffee shop one morning and re-architected how blog publishing in Micro.blog works. As some of you know, hosted blogs on Micro.blog are based on Jekyll. While this has some advantages that I wrote about in 2016, it brings some performance drawbacks as well. I’ve incrementally improved it with tweaks over the last year, but last week I finally blocked out enough time to solve more of the performance trade-offs with using Jekyll.

When you post to Micro.blog now, it will publish your new blog post on the web right away. It will also update the JSON Feed and bring the new post into the timeline. Then in the background, it will update the site index and other related pages.

This should have a dramatic impact to posting and seeing the new post show up in the Micro.blog timeline, especially for blogs with thousands of posts. Moving my own site (and it’s 2700+ blog posts) from WordPress to Micro.blog has been a great way to test these changes.

Cheri

Well done! 🙂

2018-07-23 10:35 am
Manton Reece

@cheri Thanks!

2018-07-23 10:38 am
Paul Robert Lloyd

Jekyll’s rebuild times have always been an issue, unfortunately. Out of interest, how have you resolved this? Do you now run two separate builds, one limited to publishing the latest post and feed, and another to rebuild the entire site? Might attempt the same for my own Jekyll site; anything you can share that might help me do this?

2018-07-23 10:47 am
Eddie Hinkle

That’s a great optimization!

2018-07-23 10:48 am
Chris Campbell

Thanks! It definitely feels faster.

2018-07-23 10:58 am
Manton Reece

@paulrobertlloyd I'd like to share the details in a blog post and the upcoming book. Essentially yes, I extracted some code from Jekyll and run it in a separate script to render just a few pages. I also upload photos and audio files directly when they come in.

2018-07-23 11:50 am
skoo.bz

I can feel it. Thank you for the great work.

2018-07-23 1:11 pm
David Ely

On my old Movable Type blog I used monthly archives in place of pagination and it meant never having to rebuild most of the site. I typed that up recently, fwiw. david.ely.fm/2018/07/1...

2018-07-23 1:14 pm
Manton Reece

@davextreme I like your thinking on this. Agreed about the arrows and that an archive page would be more useful. (I was also a fan of Movable Type and used it for years!)

2018-07-23 1:39 pm
David Ely

Yeah like "page 49" or whatever of a blog is just probably never visited and wasting precious processor cycles whenever it's rebuild.

2018-07-23 2:05 pm
Michael Fürstenberg

That’s great. Thank you for all your work.

2018-07-23 2:46 pm
//Jason

Excellent! Thanks! 😃

2018-07-23 3:52 pm
Smokey Ardisson

@davextreme Great, thought-provoking post; thanks for writing/sharing it. I wrote a long reflection/response on my blog.

tl;dr I don’t agree with you about the nav arrow directions, but I agree wth you on using explicit labels for them, and I am absolutely sold on getting rid of the numerical pages. Wondering if anyone knows of any WordPress code for not building the numerical pages?

2018-07-23 4:05 pm
David Ely

@smokey Yeah the left vs right argument isn’t one I’d defend to the death. It’s probably more important that a given site do it consistently (across all Tumblr pages or what have you).

2018-07-23 4:14 pm
Matthew Shanley

It’s great how much faster posting is these days.

2018-08-01 4:29 pm
Manton Reece

@arkadyan Thanks!

2018-08-01 4:33 pm
Preslav Rachev

Wow! I had no idea that hosted blogs Micro.blog were built using Jekyll. Great job!

What about conversations? For instance, I have my own self-hosted microblog, which I federated over Micro.blog, but I am still able to reply to others, send faves, etc.

P.S. Excuse my ignorance at the moment. I am still quite new to the whole IndieWeb thing.

2018-09-17 5:07 am

Manton Reece @manton
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