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Ivy – A static website generator built in Python

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Re: Ivy – A static website generator built in Python

#51

Post by pmlnr »

bgrohman wrote: post #21

It looks nice, but I guess I still[1] don’t understand the proliferation of simple static site generators. It’s pretty easy (and fun!) to build your own that works exactly as you want it to. And I don’t think a static site generator is suitable for non-technical users. Is there an in-between type of user technical enough to use a static site generator but not able to write their own? Or maybe the proliferation is onl…

Static site generators are more than suitable for non-tech users - they used to be called Macromedia Dreamweaver, Microsoft FrontPage; etc.

I'd very much like to see fullon wysiwyg static generators again; it could replace half, if not more, of the WordPress sites around.

Re: Ivy – A static website generator built in Python

#52

Post by coldtea »

bgrohman wrote: post #21

It looks nice, but I guess I still[1] don’t understand the proliferation of simple static site generators. It’s pretty easy (and fun!) to build your own that works exactly as you want it to. And I don’t think a static site generator is suitable for non-technical users. Is there an in-between type of user technical enough to use a static site generator but not able to write their own? Or maybe the proliferation is onl…

>It looks nice, but I guess I still don’t understand the proliferation of simple static site generators. It’s pretty easy (and fun!) to build your own that works exactly as you want it to.

Notice how these two sentences are contradictory -- or rather how the second explains what the first supposedly can't understand.

If it's "pretty easy and fun" to build X, then that would inevitably lead to a "proliferation of" X projects.

It just takes a person that built one to then share their implementation on GitHub to increase that proliferation, and that's a very simple additional step.

And it just takes any person who understands "opportunity cost" to want to adopt an existing static site generator rather than build their own.

Both kinds are in abundance.

Re: Ivy – A static website generator built in Python

#53

Post by bgrohman »

coldtea wrote: post #52
bgrohman wrote: post #21

It looks nice, but I guess I still[1] don’t understand the proliferation of simple static site generators. It’s pretty easy (and fun!) to build your own that works exactly as you want it to. And I don’t think a static site generator is suitable for non-technical users. Is there an in-between type of user technical enough to use a static site generator but not able to write their own? Or maybe the proliferation is onl…

> It looks nice, but I guess I still don’t understand the proliferation of simple static site generators. It’s pretty easy (and fun!) to build your own that works exactly as you want it to. Notice how these two sentences are contradictory -- or rather how the second explains what the first supposedly can't understand. If it's "pretty easy and fun" to build X, then that would inevitably lead to a "proliferation of" X…

Yep, thanks, I realized that eventually :)

Re: Ivy – A static website generator built in Python

#54

Post by stult »

bane wrote: post #38
bgrohman wrote: post #21

It looks nice, but I guess I still[1] don’t understand the proliferation of simple static site generators. It’s pretty easy (and fun!) to build your own that works exactly as you want it to. And I don’t think a static site generator is suitable for non-technical users. Is there an in-between type of user technical enough to use a static site generator but not able to write their own? Or maybe the proliferation is onl…

Learning how to program, especially when one doesn't come about it through self-selected autodidactism, can often seem to be an insurmountable challenge to people who don't know how. This applies to even extremely technical, highly intelligent people. Often they recognize that there's an extraordinary time component to learning, and they optimize around that in other ways. Learning to program is a weird thing because…

Also, as a non-front end developer, I don't have HTML fresh in my mind and don't care to. Sometimes you just want to do something quick and not have to worry about it.

Re: Ivy – A static website generator built in Python

#55

Post by bgrohman »

pmlnr wrote: post #51
bgrohman wrote: post #21

It looks nice, but I guess I still[1] don’t understand the proliferation of simple static site generators. It’s pretty easy (and fun!) to build your own that works exactly as you want it to. And I don’t think a static site generator is suitable for non-technical users. Is there an in-between type of user technical enough to use a static site generator but not able to write their own? Or maybe the proliferation is onl…

Static site generators are more than suitable for non-tech users - they used to be called Macromedia Dreamweaver, Microsoft FrontPage; etc. I'd very much like to see fullon wysiwyg static generators again; it could replace half, if not more, of the WordPress sites around.

Yeah, you’re right - I forgot about Dreamweaver and similar tools. I do think that adding wysiwyg UIs to a generator puts it in a slightly different class than the type of generator posted here, but your point is a good one. Adding a UI to a simple generator would make it much easier for non-technical people to use.

Re: Ivy – A static website generator built in Python

#56

Post by mixmastamyk »

jaredandrews wrote: post #6

Not sure if OP is the developer behind this but... As a happy user of Pelican[0], a different Python based static site generator. Why would I want to switch over to Ivy? [0] https://blog.getpelican.com/

I didn’t care for how it pushes a web server and absolute urls on you. Seems it could still learn a lot from Sphinx.

As the sibling comment mentions I sent a pull request to fix some broken css and they requested I fix their test suite first. No thanks, moving on.

Re: Ivy – A static website generator built in Python

#57

Post by bgrohman »

weberc2 wrote: post #49
bgrohman wrote: post #21

It looks nice, but I guess I still[1] don’t understand the proliferation of simple static site generators. It’s pretty easy (and fun!) to build your own that works exactly as you want it to. And I don’t think a static site generator is suitable for non-technical users. Is there an in-between type of user technical enough to use a static site generator but not able to write their own? Or maybe the proliferation is onl…

> I guess I still[1] don’t understand the proliferation of simple static site generators > It’s pretty easy (and fun!) to build your own Seems like you answered your own question. :)

Yes, indeed. My original thought was more along the lines of why there are so many generators published to solve the same problem when it’s easy to create your own custom generator as needed. Add one more step - publish your custom generator online in case it’s useful for others - and now you see the proliferation. Makes perfect sense now :)

Re: Ivy – A static website generator built in Python

#59

Post by mixmastamyk »

nine_k wrote: post #27
theoctopus wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main advantage of a static site generator is it allows you to just write the contents of each page and the generator will insert that into a page template. It means that, for example, a site-wide navbar only needs to be written once rather than added to every page manually.

Even more importantly, if you change the navbar, it changes everywhere, no chance to forget, no tedious and error-prone copy-pasting. Also, applying syntax highlighting to code fragments, doing the right thing around pictures, e.g. set explicit size, and many other seemingly trivial but tedious things. In short, static site generators remove the legwork from static HTML.

All these reasons and it sucks to write html by hand compared to markdown or rst.

Re: Ivy – A static website generator built in Python

#60

Post by gkya »

dod9er wrote: post #13

Sorry for offtopic, but I´ve seen many nice-looking website generators here, but being a backend-guy I struggle more with the frontend, getting a nice layout/theme/font without deepdiving into css/js/html. Any suggestions here ? Any Wysiwyg-Editor which generates a reasonable output ?

I know this is controversial but the default html layout is what most people need. You can use markdown or org mode etc. to generate it. One improvement may be centering the content on bigger displays, which I do for my blog with two @media rules as follows: https://www.gkayaalp.com/style.css
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