Lightweight Static Website GeneratorJune 2013 (perspective of a postdoc)
Summary
I describe a lightweight method for generating a static website, which I currently use (as of June 2013) for my personal site. The ideas in this article could inform the design of future static website generators.
As of June 2013, my personal website (www.pgbovine.net) contains almost 150 articles. In addition to writing those articles, I've also created an authoring workflow that allows me to:
I learned a bit about static site generators such as Jekyll but concluded that what I wanted to accomplish was simple enough to write by myself. The main advantage of "rolling my own" rather than using an existing tool is that I can more readily customize the code to my liking. Also, it could be hard to get an existing tool to generate output with the "look-and-feel" of my current website, so I found it easier to just write my own site generator. Editing plain-text filesTo start a new article, I simply create a new text file of the form
Each article starts with a header of metadata in YAML format. Here is the header for this article: --- title: Lightweight Static Website Generator tags: - computing - programming created: 2013-06-15 modified: 2013-06-15 summary: > I describe a lightweight method for generating a static website, which I currently use (as of June 2013) for my personal site. --- Note that the header defines metadata such as the article's title, summary, creation and modification dates, and blog-like tags. I prefer YAML over other structured formats such as XML or JSON because it's easy to write, easy to read, and easy for programs to parse (YAML parsers are available for many programming languages). After the header comes the body of the article, which is written in Markdown, a popular lightweight text format that compiles into HTML. Writing my article in Markdown (rather than raw HTML) feels just like writing ordinary text with some occasional style markup. In sum, the combination of YAML and Markdown allows me to keep article metadata and content together in a single file, which I can edit using any text editor (I mostly use Vim). Compiling to HTMLI wrote a collection of Python scripts to compile raw text files
(
Finally, I wrap the Python scripts in a Makefile to enable more efficient incremental builds. Note that all of this compilation happens locally on my computer without requiring any Internet access. Thus, I can edit my site on a long plane ride or while waiting at the doctor's office. (Note: The main reason I haven't made these scripts public is that they're hard-coded for my own website. So unless you want your site to look exactly like mine, my scripts probably won't be useful for you.) Live site pushFinally, I use Unison to push my entire site live to my web hosting service (WebFaction). Since my site is simply a collection of static files, I can use the ultra-efficient Nginx webserver. I've raved about Unison for many years. In particular, using Unison here rather than ordinary rsync allows me to edit my site both locally and on the server (if I need to ssh in to make a quick fix) and keep the two copies synchronized. Also, rsync doesn't properly account for deleted files. Running Unison to push my site live also provides a layer of "sanity checks," since it shows me exactly which files have been updated since the last sync. For instance, I recently tweaked my Python scripts to customize the HTML title only for guest articles and rebuilt my entire site. When I ran Unison, it showed me that, as expected, only the guest article HTML files have been updated since last sync: changed ----> after-high-school-guest-article.htm changed ----> asian-parents-backlash-guest-article.htm changed ----> asian-parents-communication-guest-article.htm changed ----> back-pain-guest-article.htm changed ----> overbearing-indian-father-guest-article.htm changed ----> overcoming-overbearing-parents-guest-article.htm changed ----> tiger-child-guest-article.htm changed ----> tiger-cub-guest-article.htm changed ----> undergrad-research-guest-article.htm This provides a much-needed sanity check; if other HTML files had been affected by my change, then I would be alarmed. Putting it all togetherIn sum, I've made it super-easy for me to create and edit website articles, which increases the chances that I will post more frequently. Here's my current three-step workflow:
Postscript: Version ControlOne more thing: I use Git as version control for
all of my One great property of Git is that all of the version control metadata is
cleanly kept within a
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Created: 2013-06-15 Last modified: 2013-06-20 |