Why Use Something Else?
I wrote a static site generator, called Nikola a while ago, and it's starting to get some adoption and contributions.
I think it's a fairly nice piece of code, to be honest, and it pretty much does everything I need. On the other hand, it's fun to code with.
So, if you are using another static site generator, or are researching into it, or just have opinions about it... what's missing? What should it have that it doesn't have now?
No feature too small, no idea too crazy, please share! I promise to make a good effort to implement any that seem like a good idea :-)
clean urls (i.e. stripping .html): https://github.com/ralsina/...
category support: https://github.com/ralsina/...
I think really needs improving is not features,
its documentation and making nikola more stable (more tests).
The documentation is in many places incomple or outdated.
Source layout targeting github-pages.
of course you can copy the "output" folder to a different branch
but I would prefer to have the output in the root folder.
This is possible today but the "clean" command is not reliable
to remove all generated content.
A more professional looking default template.
Sorry, I cant help on this :)
The github thing is interesting. Let's talk about that :-)
Yes, the docs are a bit behind the code, I plan on fixing that these next few days.
The template ... I may consider hiring a designer to work on one (really) but not quite now.
I just started a new blog with pelican, and I think it also lakes this feature.
I personally miss the tag cloud thing the most. At one time I had researched something, but then I forgot. That would be a visual eye candy it currently lags.
Then it doesn't display well on mobile does it. I find that critical. Being mostly text, there is no reason for it to display like a normal web page on mobile.
Sorry, me currently doesn't have the time to put effort into these, gotta work at this time of the year...
Yeah, the display on mobile is probably easy to fix, too, since bootstrap can do responsive layout, but I seem to suck at it :-(
But you promised and now I look forward to it :)
Deal! ;-)
There you go: http://lateral.netmanagers....
Turns out that, if I read the docs, I could make the site theme responsive ;-)
I use Pelican because Nikola's codebase is not that good.
If that's your opinion, I'm cool with it.
I'm an embedded developer with a deep python history. That is to say I'd prefer not to do any web programming, so I want a simple static site generator like Nikola. Question 1: Can I make a fixed "front page" (www.mysite.com) and put the blog portion on its own path (www.mysite.com/blog) ? Question 2: Is there a plugin for turning some form of math/latex markup into images (I did this once with the old rst2pdf / rst2html, but my configuration was fragile and is since broken) ?
Docutils 0.10 has a math directive, which should work, but I have not tried it myself. If it doesn't, I am sure I can make it work.
And yes, nikola allows you to do that. For example, here's nikola's own site, which has a static frontpage: http://nikola.ralsina.com.ar and a blog: http://nikola.ralsina.com.a...
I'm using Tinkerer (http://tinkerer.me/). I'm very happy with it. I publish my blog on amazon S3 with almost no cost at all.
The only thing I'm missing from Tinkerer is RSS feeds by tag or category. Currently it only provides one big RSS for all the posts.
Do Nokola has this feature?
Yes it does, for example, here is my feed for things tagged nikola: http://lateral.netmanagers....
I’m currently with Hyde. The only reason why I am not using Nikola yet is because I do not have time to do the transition. I might find some soon. I need easy RSS/Atom, documentation and user friendliness. And no need to run “sed s/%3A/:/ * -i” on every generation due to a bug that breaks media URLs containing colons (as in http:// for fuck’s sake)
Just in case, Nikola is not the one that breaks that way, is it? ;-)
I could consider a Hyde importer (or a Jekyll one, etc.)
Hyde has this weird problem. Without a fix, probably.
PS. .. date: 2012/09/15 19:52:05 — am I obligated to use such wrong formats or does the proper 2012-09-15 still work? (if not, how to make it work?)
EDIT: `nikola new_post`
Is it mandatory or can I create the files by hand?
You can create the files manually, there is no trick there. You should be able to use most common date formats without a problem.
BTW: I want speed. Real speed. 75 seconds for generating https://github.com/Kwpolska... (from scratch, because hyde usually fucks up when you don’t remove stuff before a change) on a quite powerful server is WAAAAY too long.
A full regeneration of my blog (some 2000 posts) except image galleries (because that means passing a few thousand images via PIL, which is slow), takes about 3.5 minutes in my ultrabook.
A regular rebuild (say, a new post) is about 5 seconds.
And there's hardly any optimization done, so I am sure it can be brought down a bit, although it seems to be IO bound.
improved image galleries, but these seem to be on the list already.
A way of creating article series (with links to first/next/before/index), but one can simply use tags for that... -> not so important
Oh, and something all static site generators I know are missing: generation of .htaccess files! (add a tag/etc to a post, and the post and its images are password protected)
I would attempt to help, but university currently has me swamped, I can't even find the time to build my own homepage using nikola, let alone improve it. (And I probably should look somewhere else for my picture presenting needs, my ideas feel a lot like craming stuff into it to create some weird hybrid)
the .htaccess support and article series are interesting ideas, thanks!
I am currently evaluating several static site / blog generators and found the comments here very helpful as suggestions what else to check out ;)
Nikola looks like the easiest to start with at the moment but I agree with schettino72 that documentation should be your next focus.