

Static site generation on python - dfrodriguez143
http://blog.getpelican.com/

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mixedbit
Static sites are cool! I generate my blog with Tinkerer
<http://www.tinkerer.me> which is also Python and ReStructuredText based.
Although Pelican seems to be more generic, while Tinkerer is mainly for blogs.

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meaty
Agree about static sites being cool. It seems such a terrible waste of energy
dynamically generating content each request.

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mixedbit
And updating things that generate content dynamically each time a security
vulnerability is discovered (which for most popular frameworks means often) is
such a PITA.

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sophacles
An amusing but tangential implication of this is that less popular frameworks
are either 1) more secure or 2) equally insecure but less explored. Hope for 1
but assume 2, because security is hard.

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RandallBrown
Probably should put what Pelican is on the homepage. It was weird having to go
to the doc page to figure out what it actually was.

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supar
Does anyone have some experience with pelican (possibly liquidink) and
rest2web?

There are many static website generators, but I'm looking into a python+ReST
solution. I've been using rest2web a lot, and I really love it's simplicity
compared to the other solutions. rest2web is really straightforward. In the
end, it's the python-docutils module that does _most_ of the work anyway,
while rest2web simply collects the website structure.

The only downside is that rest2web lacks a bit of polish, and I really wished
it would come with the ability to generate rss feeds for a particular tree or
tag. I was thinking about writing a plugin, but I'm unsure.

pelican seem to be already be done for the purpose. Actually, pelican seem to
target _mostly_ blogs, while I actually just want "a feed of changes" for a
particular directory tree. I don't want a blog-turned-into-a-website approach.

Does anybody had this problem? I'm really looking for feedback from people
that used rest2web here and moved to pelican/liquidink, or back maybe.
Figuring out the limitations of these tools require a long time investment and
I cannot really decide by just trying it out on toy pages.

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rplnt
I tried pelican several times, but I always found it to be too complicated to
what I want. I went through setup, generated some pages and when I started to
tinker around with it I had a feeling it would be easier to write something
from scratch.

Do you know any other static page generators, simpler and preferably in Python
as well? Or should I just get over the first impression and go with the
pelican?

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loftsy
Django can be easily adapted to write static pages using the template api and
writing to a file. Works well for me.

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ramayac
Exactly good sir, that is a great way to go :)

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BruceM
I use Pelican on a couple of sites (like <http://dylanfoundry.org/>). One
thing that I really like is that it is ReStructured Text, so most of the same
things that I do with Sphinx for docs can carry over and the work that I've
done with Pygments for syntax highlighting, still applies.

There's some room for improvement here and there, but it works pretty well and
was easy to get going.

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yen223
Are there any good guides to using ReStructuredText?

I love all things Python, but for some reason I could never wrap my head
around ReStructuredText's syntax. Maybe it's because all my favorite sites use
Markdown (including this one!), but I find Markdown's syntax to be more
intuitive.

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dochtman
Start here:

<http://sphinx-doc.org/rest.html>

Then go here for more:

<http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/rst/quickref.html>

I don't really understand why reST is so unpopular compared to Markdown.

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xintron
For HTML generation Markdown is much easier for most people to get used to and
understand. When needing to provide output in various formats reST is more
suited but also have a bit of a steeper learning curve.

It depends on what you're doing. For documentation I'm always running reST but
for articles for sites etc (with a static site generator) I will turn to
Markdown.

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evilduck
I second this opinion, though it's been a couple years since I last used it.
Designing complex tables in reST was far more cumbersome to me than just
writing it in HTML. It requires you to basically know the HTML your markup
syntax will generate anyways, then deal with the quirks of that but with less
overall control than raw HTML gives you.

However, generating PDFs, a static website, and any other formats from a
single reST document is much easier than doing to equivalent from an HTML
document so it has its uses, but I would not use it as blogging markup unless
I planned on publishing a book from the same blog content.

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mahmoudimus
Definitely love pelican as well. I've generated <http://mahmoudimus.com/blog>
with it and it's just fantastic.

Plus, I can use ReST -- a lot of the other static site generators just focus
on Markdown. If you use python, ReST is your bread and butter.

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traeblain
Love Pelican. Found it to be simplest "blog aware" generator for Python I
could find. Because it keeps maturing, there's a ton of stuff you can do with
it. But simply propping it up and starting a site, was amazingly easy.

`pelican-quickstart` and you are up and running.

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dfrodriguez143
I am considering moving from Jekyll to Pelical just because is python.

