Faux' blog

New blog

My blog used to be hosted using self-hosted WordPress. As part of the most recent yak shaving machine migration, I'd decided to eliminate PHP from normal web serving. I looked at a number of static site generators, but they all had significant issues, specifically:

• The awful formatting in my old blog posts. WordPress lets you get away with pretty much anything except using scheme-relative urls (//google.com).
• Being written in things that were hard to install, or that required specific versions of software. Always a bad sign; I need to be convinced that something I don't care about at all will not require any input from me in the next five years. Looking at things like Jekyll and pandoc, but I also had issues with Python tools like Hyde.
• Letting me actually control the output format, so I can waste my life fiddling with CSS.

I was too lazy to move the content across to anything modern, or to work out how to customise any of the existing solutions to meet my requirements, so I wrote my own; some sed, then some python, then some kind of markdown library and some more python, and woo.

Notable features:

• RFC-2822 (Header: value) and Markdown/HTML/mixed crap input
• Totally invalid HTML output
• Barely valid RSS and Atom feeds
• No comments, so no spam. Woo.

It's totally hardcoded to generate the exact site, but it's so small (160loc Python and <100loc of HTML templates) that you can probably just fork it. I didn't even name it: Faux' blog generator.