I asked for fea­ture re­quests for Niko­la my stat­ic site gen­er­a­tor. I got some. One was from long-­time us­er Kay Hayen, so I just could­n't say no.

He asked for tag cloud­s. Look:

Cute, is­n't it? And it's re­al, ac­tu­al tag da­ta from this very site. With links!

How it's done:

Niko­la gen­er­ates a JSON file that has the cloud da­ta (tag name, size, link), and that's pro­cessed by JQuery and tag­Can­vas and ... well, it work­s.

You have to add jquery.tagcanvas.min.js somewhere and embed a whole pile of raw HTML (see here for details) but hey, it works.

Hope you are hap­py, Kay, you made me code javascript, dude ;-)

It's prob­a­bly rather "easy" to make it use any of these in­stead of tag­Can­vas if any­one is so in­clined.

I wrote a stat­ic site gen­er­a­tor, called Niko­la a while ago, and it's start­ing to get some adop­tion and con­tri­bu­tion­s.

I think it's a fair­ly nice piece of code, to be hon­est, and it pret­ty much does ev­ery­thing I need. On the oth­er hand, it's fun to code with.

So, if you are us­ing an­oth­er stat­ic site gen­er­a­tor, or are re­search­ing in­to it, or just have opin­ions about it... what's miss­ing? What should it have that it does­n't have now?

No fea­ture too smal­l, no idea too crazy, please share! I prom­ise to make a good ef­fort to im­ple­ment any that seem like a good idea :-)

In­spired by Djan­go's in­ter­ac­tive con­sole, I added one to Niko­la, my stat­ic site gen­er­a­tor so that if you want to play with its in­ter­nal­s, you can do it eas­i­ly. Here's an ex­am­ple ses­sion:

$ nikola init pepe
A new site with some sample data has been created at pepe.
See README.txt in that folder for more information.
$ cd pepe
$ nikola console
Scanning posts
.
.
done!
You can now access your configuration as conf and your site engine as SITE
>>> [p.title('en') for p in SITE.timeline]
[u'Listings Demo', u'Nikola: it generates static', u'Welcome to Nikola',
u'A reStructuredText Primer', u'A reStructuredText Reference', u'Sample
Nikola Config File', u'The Nikola Handbook', u'Theming Nikola']

Have fun!

Thanks to hav­ing users try­ing to ac­tu­al­ly im­port da­ta from word­press, the word­press im­porter plug­in for Niko­la, my stat­ic site gen­er­a­tor got a cou­ple of new fea­tures.

• It will try to main­­tain your URLs via redi­rects

  If your post was in /2012/1/2/a-­­post/ and now it will be in /post­s/a-­­post.html it will cre­ate a re­di­rect from the for­mer to the lat­ter.

• url_map for com­­ment mi­­gra­­tion

  It will cre­ate a CSV file con­­tain­ing the old,new full URLs so that you can move your dis­­qus threads to the right places.

Al­so, mas­ter works with do­cu­tils 0.10 which broke in the last re­lease.

For these rea­son­s, there will be a 5.0.1 re­lease to­day or to­mor­row.

PS: if you want to see a few sites us­ing Niko­la, now you can.