One of the things I realized lately is that it’s dumb for me to use Drupal for several of my websites. To be more accurate, it’s not dumb to use Drupal to create the website, but it’s dumb for me to serve the website using Drupal when they can just be served using static pages.
Websites like How I Sold My Business, A Survival Guide for New Consultants, and The Legend of the Alaska Squirrel are all basically online books. I originally thought I might allow comments on both of them, or maybe have a forum, but those ideas either didn’t work out or they were a pain in the butt.
One day recently when I was very sick I was laying in bed and I thought about how dumb it is that I serve those pages up using Drupal. With the Drupal people discontinuing support for Drupal 6, this means that if I kick the bucket, the people who inherit all of my stuff will have to decide what to do with those websites, and since Drupal 6 isn’t supported any longer, the easiest thing to do is to shut them down. And if I don’t kick the bucket, this means that I have to update all of those sites to Drupal 7 or 8, and then I have to keep updating them every time there’s a new Drupal release.
So now my next mission is to see how I can generate static websites from Drupal websites, and this image comes from this article where Karen Stevenson talks about one possible approach to doing this. I can’t recommend her approach yet as I haven’t tried it, but it sounds like one possible idea. There’s also a Drupal “Static” module, but sadly it only works for Drupal 7, and upgrading my websites from Drupal 6 to 7 would require even more work, which defeats the purpose.
