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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

#61

Post by skywhopper »

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 agree it can be fun. And lots of us probably have written such systems ourselves. However, even for those of us who could write one, sometimes you just want to use a tool, not write it and worry about bugs and new features constantly. A good pluggable static site generator can potentially give you a lot more featues than something you write yourself.

Re: Ivy – A static website generator built in Python

#62

Post by jonnycomputer »

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…

Sure, I could write my own. But, for god's sake, why? My time is too precious to spend on all things that I could do on my own.

Re: Ivy – A static website generator built in Python

#63

Post by guitarbill »

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/

Not OP, but I'm tempted to switch. Because I had an issue with Pelican where I couldn't get year/month archives to work sanely (Pelican does year/month/day which is too fine for me). So I had to write my own generator anyway, and plumb that into Pelican. It wasn't that easy to do, although I do think Pelican is fairly hackable, if anything else was more easily hackable/extensible, I'd use it. Plus not having Python 2 legacy stuff in the codebase is a plus when I'm grokking it. I also find the Pelican config overburdened [0], but understand why it came to be that way.

I'm giving it a go this weekend, let you know if it worked out for me.

[0] http://docs.getpelican.com/en/stable/settings.html

Re: Ivy – A static website generator built in Python

#64

Post by bgrohman »

jonnycomputer wrote: post #62
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…

Sure, I could write my own. But, for god's sake, why? My time is too precious to spend on all things that I could do on my own.

Writing your own can be a good way to learn a new language as well as a good introduction to html/css if you’re new to it. Also, if you write it yourself (again, for _simple_ use cases), it’ll do exactly what you need and no more. Evidently, a lot of people have found reasons to write their own, including the author of this one - hence the proliferation of simple static site generators.

Re: Ivy – A static website generator built in Python

#65

Post by xref »

guitarbill wrote: post #63
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/

Not OP, but I'm tempted to switch. Because I had an issue with Pelican where I couldn't get year/month archives to work sanely (Pelican does year/month/day which is too fine for me). So I had to write my own generator anyway, and plumb that into Pelican. It wasn't that easy to do, although I do think Pelican is fairly hackable, if anything else was more easily hackable/extensible, I'd use it. Plus not having Python 2…

bookmarking this thread, as a pelican user I'd love to come back and read your experience on it vs Ivy

Re: Ivy – A static website generator built in Python

#66

Post by crdoconnor »

ams6110 wrote: post #48
crdoconnor wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. I don't think that's true. It looks deceptively easy up front but the subtleties involved actually make it pretty hard. I've tried hugo, jekyll and pelican and they've all pissed me off for one reason or another. A common issue…

> Ivy seems to have "solved" this problem by having almost no themes. This is not exactly the solution I was thinking of... Yes, it really is a chicken-egg problem where I think you need to start with at least a half-dozen attractive themes to get attention. Theme designers are not going to build themes for a site generator that nobody uses. And nobody (relatively) is going to use a site generator that has only a "do…

I don't think the chicken-egg problem is that bad, the themes are all open source and you can port them. Many exist for a few generators.

A lot of the themes on generators like Hugo are ugly or don't work too.

Probably porting a group of 10 nice ones would be enough.

Re: Ivy – A static website generator built in Python

#67

Post by ioddly »

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 find the features of Jekyll important; I use it for client projects and mock up designs. While I don't like everything about how it's structured and I've written my own for fun, it'd be a lot of work on my part to create and maintain something equivalent.

Re: Ivy – A static website generator built in Python

#68

Post by zmmmmm »

General question - I don't understand why so many static site generates, github, many others, all use templates that won't fill the width of the page. Is using the full width of the page particularly difficult to design for? Or is it an aesthetic decision that template authors feel like having a 20 inch wide monitor with 8 inches of text in the middle flanked by 12 inches of white space is a nice layout? Particularly for code examples it's very frustrating seeing lines wrapped around unnecessarily on a large, wide monitor.

(sorry if this sounds like a rant, actually just genuinely curious).

Re: Ivy – A static website generator built in Python

#69

Post by sgallant »

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…

We're helping bridge the gap for non-technical users with our Jekyll and Hugo CMS (https://forestry.io). There are many other options too, just check out https://headlesscms.org.

It's an exciting time to be a web developer. We have many static site generators (like this one) to help build super performant sites, we can host them in the cloud for a negligible cost, and we can keep everything in Git.

Re: Ivy – A static website generator built in Python

#70

Post by sgallant »

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.

Static site generators are very WYSIWYG friendly, see my comment above about our Jekyll and Hugo CMS. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16254696
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