Entries tagged static

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.

Tags: poole, static, template | 12 comments

Some brief software updates:

Custodian

This is the monitoring tool I wrote for Bytemark. It still rocks, and has run over 10 million tests without failure.

I'd love more outside feedback, even if just to say "documentation needs work".

Slaughter

This is my sysadmin tool for multiple hosts - consider it cfengine-lite, or cfengine-trivial more likely.

The 2.x release is finally out, and features pluggable transports. That means your central server can be running HTTP, RSYNC, FTP, or anything you like.

90% of the changes came from or were inspired by Csillag Tamas, to whom I owe a debt of thanks.

Templer

A static-site generator, written in Perl.

I use this to generate blogspam.net, and other sites from simple layouts. Tutorial available online.

redis-document-store

A trivial hack which allows using Redis as a schema-less document storage system.

Assuming you never delete documents it is simple, transparent, and already in live use for Debian Administration

Random Comment on Templer:

Although I've made extensive notes on common static site generators, and they will be discussed at length in the near future, I do want to highlight one problem common to 90% of them: Symbolic links.

For example webgen fails my simple test:

~/hg/websites$ webgen create test.example.com
~/hg/websites$ cd test.example.com/src/

~/hg/websites/test.example.com/src$ mkdir jquery-1.2.3
~/hg/websites/test.example.com/src$ touch jquery-1.2.3/jquery.js
~/hg/websites/test.example.com/src$ ln -s jquery-1.2.3 jquery

~/hg/websites/test.example.com$ webgen
Starting webgen...
...
Finished
~/hg/websites/test.example.com$ ls out/  | grep jq
jquery-1.2.3

Here we see creating a symlink to a directory has not produced a matching symlink in the output. Something I use frequently. for example.

Some tools mangled symlinked directories, or files, some ignore them completely. Neither is acceptible.

Tags: custodian, slaughter, static, templer | 2 comments