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Simple website creation tools

29 November 2012 21:50

I host a number of websites which are mostly static in nature, these are often hand-crafted, but three of them us a slightly hacked up creation of my own.

Given a master "template" the file foo.skx gets massaged into foo.html.

Sadly I added features randomly, and now I have three template-driven sites which are handled slightly differently. This put me in the position of having to choose between two options:

  • Unify my template-handling.
  • Use something else.

Simplifying my life is good. So I examined a list of static site generators, and a few more found by searching github.

Other than doing clever things by knowing which page is "current" I needed to do only minimal magic:

  • Conditionally include files.
  • Setup per-page CSS files.
    • e.g. This page and this page differ by the stylesheet used. (And the text content too, clearly!)
  • Setup per-page templates.

Webgen looked like a good fit, but I couldn't get per-page templates to work out. Either they would work, or I would get weird errors about blocks not being known.

Webby worked, but I didn't like it.

Poole was the next one that I got far down the road with, but it allowed only a single site-wide template. Shame because otherwise I loved its flexibility enought to tolerate writing "macros" in Python.

I've still got to test more out, but it is a fun process. I fully intend to adopt an existing tool, and not keep working on my own.

Tonight I'm going to look at a few more.

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