makesite VS Pelican

Thank you for sharing the link to the source code. My simple site generator is based on my wife's project makesite.py[1]. In fact, I used her site generator for a few years before I went all in on Common Lisp for my personal projects. Then I reimplemented makesite.py in Common Lisp.

[1]: https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite/

I ended up using the developer-focused https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite , but I heard Hugo and Jekyll have plenty of themes that I assume can be dropped in. Good luck!

I've been using makesite.py, which is ~200 lines of python, dumping the picture in a pics folder and then hand editing the markdown.

Maybe a few lines of code and template work would let you add a custom template that would automatically add a folder worth of images.

https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite/blob/master/makesite....

https://gohugo.io/

It's written in go but what's great about it, unlike many competitors written in Javascript or Python, is that it is just a simple binary you download and run, you do not need to get a PhD in the go build system to start a web site also it is crazy fast. It can publish a site to something like S3 or Azure Storage behind a CDN and you do not have to worry about anything other than paying the storage and bandwidth bills.

Myself I've been procrastinating on getting myself a blog and my take is Hugo is not customizable enough for me without learning a lot of Go, so I have looked at are either Python-based or oriented towards scientific publishing oriented systems such as

https://getpelican.com/

https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/

https://quarto.org/

(I want to write stuff like https://ontology2.com/essays/PropertiesColorsAndThumbnails.h...)

I've given this list to people in your shoes and they usually react with information overload

https://jamstack.org/generators/

part of that is that there are 355 generators (there have to be some good ones in there somewhere) but it also uses the kind of miscommunication patterns we're used to in webtech where, for instance, you'd think they are pushing Javascript down your throat (the "J" stands for Javascript but the generators I've mentioned generate mostly HTML with just a little Javascript.)

Pick something simple and run with it, if I did that 2 years ago I'd be blogging now.

Not really tried the Claude 3.5, later tried o1-preview on github models and recently Qwen2.5 32B for a prompt to generate a litestar[0] app to manage a wysiwyg content using grapesjs[1] and use pelican[2] to generate static site. It generated very bad code and invented many libraries in import which didn't exist. Cluade was one of the worst code generator, later tried sieve of atkin to generate primes to N and then use miller-rabin test to test each generated prime both using all the cpu core available. Claude completely failed and could never get a correct code without some or the other errors especially using multiprocess, o1-preview got it right in first attempt, Qwen 2.5 32B got it right in 3'rd error fix. In general for some very simple code Claude is correct but when using something new it completely fails, o1-preview performs much better. Give a try to generate some manim community edition visualization using Claude, it generates something not working correct or with errors, o1-preview much better job.

In most of my test o1-preview performed way better than Claude and Qwen was not that bad either.

[0] https://github.com/litestar-org/litestar

[1] https://grapesjs.com/

[3] https://getpelican.com/

I swapped away from Wordpress to Pelican, a static site generator written in Python. The theme is a heavily customized version of Octapress - and its really performant with zero third-party dependencies / network requests.

Plus I like that I can literally click a button in Obsidian which formats a note, compresses/optimizes the media, and pushes it up to my website. Frictionless blog posting FTW.

https://github.com/getpelican/pelican

https://mordenstar.com

Though... recently I've been thinking about swapping over to Astro because the grass is always greener.

That's why I use Pelican as a static site generator.

https://github.com/getpelican/pelican

As the maintainer of the Python-based Pelican static site generator for over a decade, I can say with confidence that my experience has been nothing like what is described in this article.

Most of Pelican’s code was written by other people, and yet I have spent almost zero time debugging that code, much less my own. After taking advantage of Pelican’s rich plugin ecosystem and adding a handful of useful plugins, I continue to be amazed by how much time this publishing system saves me, and how little time I must spend to keep everything running smoothly.

What it would take to accomplish this by writing HTML by hand instead… I simply can’t fathom it. But once again, that’s just one person’s experience, and YMMV.

[0]: https://getpelican.com

Most static site generators will work to create a blog. I use pelican [1], which serves my needs.

You will likely need to edit your blogposts a little bit before putting them in the book. So I recommend a separate program for that altogether.

[1] https://getpelican.com/

In my experience, [Pelican](https://getpelican.com/) does a good job of allowing you to edit themes on all pages at once with its static page generator.

There are a lot of built in features designed more for blog-like websites, but I’ve found it pretty easy to make my personal website with it.

Pelican is a preferred option for Python developers.