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Ivy – A static website generator built in Python

mulholland.xyz

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Re: Ivy – A static website generator built in Python

#31
I love this sort of static generator for a non-obvious (perhaps) reason: you can version control the source. I find that hugely useful when maintaining a complex site.

I wrote a similar tool, years and years ago, that took what looked like "troff -ms" input and spit out the whole website, complete with a site map. Here's an example

http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/bkdocs/UG/tmp/Introduction.html

if you go up a directory level and poke around, that's the source to website and webroff is the script that produced that website.

Re: Ivy – A static website generator built in Python

#32
post #25

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'm one of those people who falls into that group -- I can, and have, used a static site generator, but have nearly zero programming knowledge so couldn't make one of my own. The biggest issue I have now is choosing which one to use. I've mostly used Hugo, with good results, but always have that slight niggle wondering if there's something that would work a bit better for me.

Cool, thanks for the reply. Good to know you have plenty of options.

Re: Ivy – A static website generator built in Python

#33
post #29

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…

>Is there an in-between type of user technical enough to use a static site generator but not able to write their own? A lot of people who want pretty websites without writing or learning a lick of frontend technologies.

Gotcha, that makes sense. I hadn’t considered programmers who don’t know html/css and don’t care to learn it.

Re: Ivy – A static website generator built in Python

#34

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 fall into the category of a technical user who could build their own, however I use existing ones as:

- It's faster and I already have more fun projects than my time allows.

- I don't particularly enjoy writing HTML/CSS (though the rest of the project would be fun).

- I'm happier using an existing template rather than making my own. I know I'll be too critical of the design if I do it myself.

Re: Ivy – A static website generator built in Python

#36

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[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 involves one of the 'template' themes I found on their template theme libraries not working on the "latest" version of the generator.

Ivy seems to have "solved" this problem by having almost no themes. This is not exactly the solution I was thinking of...

There's still a gap in the market here I think, and there will continue to be a proliferation (like how there was with bad javascript toolsets until jquery 'won' ~2007-8) until somebody makes an acceptably 'good' one or fixes an existing one until it obviously stands head and shoulders above the rest.

If you can make a well designed static site generator with lots of nice themes (or the potential for that) that doesn't fail horribly when I try to use it in a normal fashion I'd switch to it in a heartbeat and tell all of my friends. I'm using hugo now, but I'm not super happy about it: last problem with that being that I couldn't get it to competently handle breadcrumb navigation.

Re: Ivy – A static website generator built in Python

#37
post #30

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…

>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 only because they are both easy and fun to create? Not sure if you mean to ask why people don't create their own static sites (without generators), or did you mean dynamic sites using PHP/Ruby/Python? For the argument over dynamic sites: Yes - the type that does not want…

Hi, thanks, that all makes sense. I was asking why there are so many static site generators and why you wouldn’t just create a custom static site generator yourself, not why you would use one. I use one myself. Based on some of the other replies, I can see that there are use cases for not creating your own - when you aren’t a programmer, or when you don’t know or care to learn html and css, or when an existing generator already does all that you need.

Re: Ivy – A static website generator built in Python

#38

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 once you learn the mental processes of how to do it, it comes fairly easily. But the idea of "I'd like a tool that makes websites for me" and then knowing how to divide that problem down to the right mental abstraction model that perfectly (or near perfectly fits) some programming language and technical environment is a very difficult learning curve.

It's much simpler then to present small technical pieces that are well constrained in scope and definition and have tooling somebody else built do all the rest of the heavy lifting.

Static site generators are one of those things that are relatively easy, even for newish programmers, to build, but exist right on the other side of that learning curve for non-programmers.

Re: Ivy – A static website generator built in Python

#39
post #34

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 fall into the category of a technical user who could build their own, however I use existing ones as: - It's faster and I already have more fun projects than my time allows. - I don't particularly enjoy writing HTML/CSS (though the rest of the project would be fun). - I'm happier using an existing template rather than making my own. I know I'll be too critical of the design if I do it myself.

Gotcha, makes sense. My question seems a little short-sighted in retrospect :)

Re: Ivy – A static website generator built in Python

#40
post #7
post #2

Please, everyone, don't use the "unlicense" for software. It makes it impossible to use / contribute globally. See e.g. here: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1471...

The fear-mongering about public domain seems to drift further and further from reality. Is SQLite "impossible" to use globally? Its public domain dedication is even more terse than the unlicense. If it really does become a practical issue for Germans, maybe the real problem is the German legal system.

SQLite will sell you a perpetual license if you need it.
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