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Now Blogging with Nikola

Static site generation FTW

Over the last few weekends I've been playing around with various static site generation tools in a bid to free myself from WordPress update hell. I've been used to using Jekyll for quite a while now on a number of sites (such as BrightstarDB for example), but for my personal site I wanted to try something different and as I'm much happier coding in Python than in Ruby I took a look at the various static site generation options for that language.

In then end I've gone with Nikola for a couple of reasons. Firstly it seemed the best documented and most active of the various open source offerings; and secondly because it supports using reStructuredText as a format for writing post content, which I find as easy to write as Markdown and cleaner in some respects.

The theme I'm using (right now at least) is hand-rolled and based on a lovely Jekyll theme called *folio (all the pretty stuff is due to that theme's author, all the ugly nasty hack-y stuff is due to my inelegant reworking of it for use as a Nikola theme).

For me this is a bit of a circle back around. In the early days, this site was a static stite generated from XML sources using my own XSLT-based pipeline. Then some years ago I moved to WordPress when the site stopped being my main "business site" and started to be more general rants and photography. Right now I'm definitely loving the relative ease of writing posts in text and getting back to blogging from the command line 1 !

I've tried to ensure that all the old content that was not pure blog stuff has also been migrated (just in case you are itching to read 10-year old papers on Topic Maps). If you are looking for something in particular that seems to have gone, get in touch with me: kal at (the domain of this blog).

1

Though TBH I am mostly using PyCharm to write the actual text :)

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