brainwagon

As I work on getting the hugo version of this website up and running, I have continued to work on understanding the security issues which sent me to this place. But even a nominally “simple” system like hugo actually requires a bunch of knowledge. I can’t help but think there is something simpler inside this. I remember some 25 years ago, I worked on a script for managing weblogs, and it was just a few hundred lines of code. I seem to have lost that to posterity, and it’s shocking how many sites seem to require huge development environments, frameworks, and integrate to complex source management in complex ways.

I was struggling with a particular point in hugo, so I decided to surf off and do some relaxing by searching for other alternatives. It was then with some joy which is hard to explain that I encountered makesite.py:

makesite.py, a simple static site generator in python

It’s less that 250 lines of Python. There is no documentation, because without question the documentation would be longer than just reading the code. (I do actually think that a few examples would explain most of what you need to know.) I may spend some time reading it over.

Honestly, 90% of what I want is just something that can organize my daily writing of Markdown text. A small amount probably would need to be added to make photos available. I’m actually totally comfortable with uploading the generated site using something like rsync. As a matter of fact, almost anything more complicated doesn’t deliver sufficient value to be worth the effort.

That’s true of most technology.

Addendum: There are other micro/static blogging platforms of course.

John Bokma’s “tumbleblog” has both Python and Perl variants, and seems like a pretty cool thing, although it appears that the it maintains the blog as a single file, which I think would probably not scale quite well enough for my use case.

Digging deep into my memory, I recall that the pyblosxom which was derived from the perl program blosxom. I had tinkered together a small system based upon these ideas some two decades ago. It’s not clear that pyblosxom retains the simplicity of the system, but I recall them being inspiring.

If you want simple, bashblog is simply a bash script (about 1200 lines).