Hyde based website
Screenshot of the new website as at 2013-01-01.
Here we are! New year, new website!
I finally joined my old technical blog and my older technical website into a single site based on Hyde, a static web site generator. You can find all the stuff previously in ‘Codders’ splitted at the Resources tab and the nice Projects page. And the Blog tab contains, of course, the blog.
Wondering about the technical details? Keep reading.
But what about WiKo?
Static website generation was our original idea when we started WiKo. What we wanted was being able to:
- Write content with our preferred editor
- Write markup free content (wiki, markdown…)
- Update the website by commit
- Get static content, no dynamic generation on page retrieval
- Extend it to fit our Nth whim
WiKo was working properly well with the website pages, and I am still using it, but I got stalled with the blogging part. Not that it was hard to implement but that meanwhile many other projects have started with the same idea of static generation and many of them has passed us by, so why not trying them and see whether they are worth. Indeed they were, so I switched.
Hyde is the Python alter ego of another static website generator named Jeckyll, which was written in Ruby. Jeckyll is more mature but, hell, I really love Python and I planned to hack on it to add any feature I had in WiKo. That’s another nice trait of Hyde, it is extensible in a very straight forward way.
You can write content using Markdown or HTML, and you can use Django or Jinja templates to setup your design. Markdown is not that far from our wiki like syntax, so most of the pages I exported with blogger2wiko worked with very few tweaks.
Comments enabled!
One thing I disliked of Hyde is having to rely on external comments services like Disqus. I wanted the comments as files during generation and I wanted to rely just on free software. So I wrote a plugin to add them but still being pretty static. There are still a lot of enhancements to be done, but right now I am pretty happy with what I have, it is simple and it works.
Try it out! Send me comments! :-)
Once I have implemented in Hyde, it seems quite straight forward to implement it in WiKo since it was one of the blogging related features missing.
Still not a perfect solution
Still some caveats are still arround.
Generation is much slower than WiKo, but it seems that it can be speed up, for example, every plugin is called twice, which makes no sense to me.
I also lost the dual Html/LaTeX generation I had in WiKo, so i cannot use it directly for my thesis writing. But the nice thing of using something that other people uses is that there are many people doing the work for you.
Other features that we incorporated to WiKo can be easily migrated to WiKo, like BiBTeX support
Hi, comments are working!