Static site generation on python | Hacker News Reader

Static site generation on python

blog.getpelican.com

Static sites are cool! I generate my blog with Tinkerer http://www.tinkerer.me which is also Python and ReStructuredText based. Although Pelican seems to be more generic, while Tinkerer is mainly for blogs.

Agree about static sites being cool. It seems such a terrible waste of energy dynamically generating content each request.

And updating things that generate content dynamically each time a security vulnerability is discovered (which for most popular frameworks means often) is such a PITA.

An amusing but tangential implication of this is that less popular frameworks are either 1) more secure or 2) equally insecure but less explored. Hope for 1 but assume 2, because security is hard.

Probably should put what Pelican is on the homepage. It was weird having to go to the doc page to figure out what it actually was.

Does anyone have some experience with pelican (possibly liquidink) and rest2web?

There are many static website generators, but I'm looking into a python+ReST solution. I've been using rest2web a lot, and I really love it's simplicity compared to the other solutions. rest2web is really straightforward. In the end, it's the python-docutils module that does most of the work anyway, while rest2web simply collects the website structure.

The only downside is that rest2web lacks a bit of polish, and I really wished it would come with the ability to generate rss feeds for a particular tree or tag. I was thinking about writing a plugin, but I'm unsure.

pelican seem to be already be done for the purpose. Actually, pelican seem to target mostly blogs, while I actually just want "a feed of changes" for a particular directory tree. I don't want a blog-turned-into-a-website approach.

Does anybody had this problem? I'm really looking for feedback from people that used rest2web here and moved to pelican/liquidink, or back maybe. Figuring out the limitations of these tools require a long time investment and I cannot really decide by just trying it out on toy pages.

I tried pelican several times, but I always found it to be too complicated to what I want. I went through setup, generated some pages and when I started to tinker around with it I had a feeling it would be easier to write something from scratch.

Do you know any other static page generators, simpler and preferably in Python as well? Or should I just get over the first impression and go with the pelican?

https://bitbucket.org/obensonne/poole

https://github.com/mythmon/wok

http://ringce.com/hyde

https://github.com/dz/chisel

http://mynt.mirroredwhite.com

http://tinkerer.me

http://nikola.ralsina.com.ar

http://blogofile.com

Django can be easily adapted to write static pages using the template api and writing to a file. Works well for me.

Exactly good sir, that is a great way to go :)

I had the same feeling when I was using pelican as well. I have switched my personal site over to blogofile: http://www.blogofile.com/

Much simpler and better documentation in my opinion.

I use nanoc (http://nanoc.ws/). It's written in Ruby - but it's quite powerful yet so very simple to use.

I've split hair over jekyll/octopress configuration until I stumbled upon this nimble beauty... haven't looked back since.

Give nanoc a try.

I use Pelican on a couple of sites (like http://dylanfoundry.org/). One thing that I really like is that it is ReStructured Text, so most of the same things that I do with Sphinx for docs can carry over and the work that I've done with Pygments for syntax highlighting, still applies.

There's some room for improvement here and there, but it works pretty well and was easy to get going.

Are there any good guides to using ReStructuredText?

I love all things Python, but for some reason I could never wrap my head around ReStructuredText's syntax. Maybe it's because all my favorite sites use Markdown (including this one!), but I find Markdown's syntax to be more intuitive.

Start here:

http://sphinx-doc.org/rest.html

Then go here for more:

http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/rst/quickref.html

I don't really understand why reST is so unpopular compared to Markdown.

I do wish that the process for extending docutils and Sphinx were better documented.

There's also a bunch of things in Sphinx that need improvement with the PDF and ePub output.

But for what it is and does, I like it a lot. I don't know of anything for Markdown that lets me do as much structured markup as I can do in reST.

For HTML generation Markdown is much easier for most people to get used to and understand. When needing to provide output in various formats reST is more suited but also have a bit of a steeper learning curve.

It depends on what you're doing. For documentation I'm always running reST but for articles for sites etc (with a static site generator) I will turn to Markdown.

I second this opinion, though it's been a couple years since I last used it. Designing complex tables in reST was far more cumbersome to me than just writing it in HTML. It requires you to basically know the HTML your markup syntax will generate anyways, then deal with the quirks of that but with less overall control than raw HTML gives you.

However, generating PDFs, a static website, and any other formats from a single reST document is much easier than doing to equivalent from an HTML document so it has its uses, but I would not use it as blogging markup unless I planned on publishing a book from the same blog content.

> I don't really understand why reST is so unpopular compared to Markdown.

There are two reasons: first is that Markdown is much simpler and is more narrow scoped and second is that reST implementation only exists in Python and Haskell - to some extent, not supporting extensions, obviously. Both of those reasons make entry level higher.

> I don't really understand why reST is so unpopular compared to Markdown.

Markdown is so much simpler than Rest.

Sidenote : you can use Markdown with Pelican if you want. You just need to install the Markdown package.

ReST and Markdown are not at odds. The former can be seen as a (vast) expansion of the latter. It's not an actual extension, of course, because the syntax is somewhat different, but it is conceptually.

Ha, didn't know Dylan. Seems like a fun little language. Thanks for sharing.

Definitely love pelican as well. I've generated http://mahmoudimus.com/blog with it and it's just fantastic.

Plus, I can use ReST -- a lot of the other static site generators just focus on Markdown. If you use python, ReST is your bread and butter.

Love Pelican. Found it to be simplest "blog aware" generator for Python I could find. Because it keeps maturing, there's a ton of stuff you can do with it. But simply propping it up and starting a site, was amazingly easy.

`pelican-quickstart` and you are up and running.

I am considering moving from Jekyll to Pelical just because is python.

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