pgcontents VS entr

First, the format. The ipynb format does not play nicely with git since it stores the cell's source code and output in the same file. But Jupyter has built-in mechanisms to allow other formats to look like notebooks. For example, here's a library that allows you to store notebooks on a postgres database (I know this isn't practical, but it's a great example). To give more practical advice, jupytext allows you to open .py files as notebooks. So you can develop interactively but in the backend, you're storing .py files.

First, yes, this is a common question. IPython does not try to deal with that, it's just the executing engine.

Notebooks, do not have to be stored in ipynb form, I would suggest to look at https://github.com/mwouts/jupytext, and notebook UI is inherently not design for multi-file and application developpement. So training humans will always be necessary.

Technically Jupyter Notebook does not even care that notebooks are files, you could save then using say postgres (https://github.com/quantopian/pgcontents) , and even sync content between notebooks.

I'm not too well informed anymore on this particular topic, but there are other folks at https://www.quansight.com/ that might be more aware, you can also ask on discourse.jupyter.org, I'm pretty sure you can find threads on those issues.

I think on the Jupyter side we could do a better job curating and exposing many tools to help with that, but there are just so many hours in the day...

I also recommend I don't like notebook from Joel Grus, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jiPeIFXb6U it's a really funny talk, a lot of the points are IMHO invalid as Joel is misinformed on how things can be configured, but still a great watch.

entr ("Event Notify Test Runner"; GitHub), is a command-line tool written by Eric Radman that allows running arbitrary commands whenever files change.

I use something very similar on https://lunar.fyi and https://lowtechguys.com but I wouldn’t call this “simple” anymore.

They use Jinja templating, I prefer Slim (https://github.com/slim-template/slim#syntax-example) which has a more Pythonic syntax (there is plim [0] in Python for that)

I use Tailwind as well for terse styling and fast experimentation (allows me to write a darkMode-aware and responsive 100 line CSS in a single line with about 10 classes)

For interaction I can write CoffeeScript directly in the page [1] and have it compiled by plim.

I run a Caddy static server [2] and use Syncthing [3] to have every file save deployed instantly to my Hetzner server.

I use entr [4] and livereloadx [5] to rebuild the pages and do hot reload on file save. All the commands are managed in a simple Makefile [6]

———

You can already see how the footnotes take up a large chunk of this comment, this is not my idea of simple. Sure, the end result is readable static HTML and I never have to fight obscure React errors, but it’s a high effort setup for starters.

Simple for me would be: write markdown files for pages, a simple CSS for general styling (should be optional), click to deploy on my domain. Images should automatically be resized to multiple sizes and optimized, videos re-encoded for smaller filesize etc.

I have mostly implemented that for myself (https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/How%20I%20write%20this%20blog...) but it feels fragile. I’d rather pay for a professional solution.

[0] https://plim.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[1] https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/lowtechguys/blob/main/src/rcmd...

[2] https://caddyserver.com/docs/command-line#caddy-file-server

[3] https://syncthing.net

[4] https://github.com/eradman/entr

[5] https://nitoyon.github.io/livereloadx/

[6] https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/lowtechguys/blob/main/Makefile

Try entr for fast reloading. Another one is hupper.

entr