A New Site Generator

Way back in 2011 I moved this site from wordpress to a static blog powered by jekyll. I haven’t changed much about the site since then. Writing posts in markdown and keeping them in a simple folder still feels like the right decision.

I’ve been running this blog on an increasingly ancient Debian server. I recently moved, with help, to a new server running a more up to date release. Since this was published as a static site I could move it as-is and deal with setting up jekyll on my own time.

That time came, and I spent a couple hours trying to get all the ruby dependencies to actually install properly. After about the fifth time trying to install a google provided gem that said I needed to install the version I was trying to install, I got frustrated enough that I started looking for alternatives.

I looked through the list of options and tried a couple, but just about anything would require me to make a significant numer of changes to my site. Why not just build it myself?

So over the last couple of weeks I’ve been working on and off on a new site generator written in python, customized to work with my site mostly as-is, with only updated templates (switching from liquid to jinja) and a few minor changes to some of the static pages since they’re being generated differently.

The resulting script is not sophisticated and fits in a single file. But it does the job.

Posted on 19 March 2023