Show HN: First Crack, a simple static blog engine in Python | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: First Crack, a simple static blog engine in Python

bitbucket.org

44 pointszacssite12 comments

> Because I started this project in 2011, though, with Python 2, you will need Python 2.* to use my blogging engine. I plan to port it to Python 3 soon. Use with versions other than 2.* at your own risk.

7 months until PY2 goes EOL...

Everyone and their dog has written a static site generator - and that is good thing.

Blogs are a personal creation and there is something very satisfying about publishing your own text using your own tools.

Things I particularly like about this project:

* No dependencies

* the generated pages are clean

* good documentation and usability

Since it is tradition at this point, here is my static site generator: https://github.com/andrewstephens75/gensite

And an example page: https://sheep.horse/2017/10/how_you_are_reading_this_page.ht...

All you need to do to make this work with Python 3 is change your print statements (add parentheses) and change raw_input to input, as far as I can tell running it in python 3 locally. It seems to work perfectly with these ~20 seconds of changes.

Sounds like 2to3 should be able to magically fix it? I suppose adding "from future import print" and similar for input would keep it working for python2 too?

Ed: i think that should be:

from builtins import input

from __future__ import print_function

Don't bother with python 2 compatibility, it's EOL in a few months. And 2to3 will probably work but even that is more effort than it needs to be.

An official "EOL" from the Python Benevolency doesn't mean Python 2 has reached the end of its life. There's too many projects out there using it for the same reasons this one is, i.e. "Because I started this project in 2011, though, with Python 2, you will need Python 2".

Both Python 2 and Python 3 will continue to exist for active projects for a long time yet. All programming languages have this issue, though many try to hide it, such as Apache Groovy.

In 2012, Groovy 2 shipped as two separate compilers bundled together, one was a continuation of Groovy 1 and the other was the new edition with the invoke-dynamic capabilities. A few weeks ago, the Groovy Committee decided to keep these separate in the bundle for the upcoming Groovy 3 release, add the new features such as the parser upgrade from Antlr 2 to Antlr 4 to the invoke-dynamic compiler only, and keep the other compiler (the one actually used by Gradle and Jenkins and everyone else) at the Groovy 1 capabilities.

So virtually everyone will be using the old antlr2 parser and slower dynamic function dispatches in Apache Groovy for a long time yet, something which the Groovy project managers are deliberately doing to cater for all the legacy Groovy code out there.

My favourite static blog engine is a NIH fueled mix of NodeJS, Handlebars, fs-extra and some glue code. It takes about 10 minutes to knock one up and then you are blessed you can extend it using JS not whatever DSLs are thrown are you by the static site generator. There is a lot more help out there for JS problems than Hugo problems.

I wrote a static microblog engine in Python as well (3.7+). There is also a Perl version: https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog

Demo site: http://plurrrr.com/

> First Crack does not rely on any third-party tools, code, or frameworks

Sorry just a little nitpick: Python is a dependency that's not guaranteed to be on someone's system, probably should mention this somewhere

> First Crack does not rely on any third-party tools, code, or frameworks.

That's music to my ears!

No example images or demo site?

Looks to be https://zacs.site

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