Since Niko­la, my stat­ic blog/web­site gen­er­a­tor is get­ting a sub­stan­tial amount of code from oth­er­s, I thought it may be a good idea to rough­ly doc­u­ment how it works in­ter­nal­ly. So, here is Niko­la in­ter­nals which is very much a work in progress.

If you are us­ing Google's sitemap_­gen to gen­er­ate a sitemap for your site... don't.

1. It's aban­­doned

2. It's python 2.x on­­ly

3. The code is ghast­­ly

4. The out­­put it pro­­duces is triv­ial

For ex­am­ple, I just re­placed it with ~30 lines of nicer code. and prob­a­bly so can you.

Sev­er­al peo­ple have mi­grat­ed from Word­press in­to Niko­la, and here are some of their de­scrip­tions of the pro­cess:

• A slideshow by kopf (hey, that's his IRC nick­­­name ;-): Mi­­grat­ing from Word­­press to a stat­ic-­­page blog

• A tu­­to­ri­al in ger­­man by Niko Wenselows­­ki (who has done a lot of work to make the Word­­press im­­porter be­have): Word­­press nach Niko­la umziehen

• Slight­­ly old­er, this post by Kushal Das: Im­­port­ing your Word­­press blog in­­­to Niko­la

In gen­er­al, it seems to be work­ing, but there's some work still to be done. Word­press sup­ports many dif­fer­ent plug­ins and ex­ten­sions which re­act to markup in their pages, and sup­port­ing that's al­most an in­fi­nite task. Cur­rent­ly Niko­la's im­porter han­dles a few of the more com­mon. But if you try to im­port your blog and get less than ide­al re­sult­s, please file a bug and I'll do my best to fix it.

Usu­al­ly the fix­es are rather sim­ple, it's just that I have nev­er seen that spe­cif­ic thing ;-)

Have fun!

This has been in the mas­ter branch of Niko­la for a while but on­ly now have I tried to ful­ly in­te­grate it, and pol­ish all (most) of the rough edges.

By de­fault, Niko­la comes with sup­port for search forms us­ing Google and Duck­duck­go. Some peo­ple dis­ap­prove of them for dif­fer­ent rea­sons [1] so there was a re­quest about sup­port­ing a stand­alone search en­gine.

The best of breed of those things seems to be Tipue so that's what I sup­port­ed.

To use this, you need to en­able a plug­in, and do some con­fig­u­ra­tion changes.

The plugin is called task_localsearch and you can find it in the Nikola source tree

Suppose your site is in a folder called mysite then to enable this plugin you need to create mysite/plugins and then copy task_localsearch.plugin and task_localsearch in there.

Then, in your site's conf.py find these options and change them accordingly:

SEARCH_FORM = """
<span class="navbar-form pull-left">
<input type="text" id="tipue_search_input">
</span>"""

ANALYTICS = """
<script type="text/javascript" src="/assets/js/tipuesearch_set.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/assets/js/tipuesearch.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function() {
    $('#tipue_search_input').tipuesearch({
        'mode': 'json',
        'contentLocation': '/assets/js/tipuesearch_content.json',
        'showUrl': false
    });
});
</script>
"""

EXTRA_HEAD_DATA = """
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/assets/css/tipuesearch.css">
<div id="tipue_search_content" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; padding: 20px;"></div>
"""

How does it work? Here's a de­mo site for you to try!

I would not rec­om­mend do­ing this for a big site, since it may load a mul­ti­-megabyte javascript file when you search, but for small to medi­um sites, it may be ok.

As usu­al in all pro­gram­ming list­s, ev­ery once in a while some­one will post a ques­tion in the Python Ar­genti­na list which is ob­vi­ous­ly his home­work. To han­dle that there are two schools of thought.

1. Telling the stu­­dent how to do it is help­ing them cheat.

2. Telling the stu­­dent how to do it is teach­ing him.

I tend more to­wards 1) but I think I have dis­cov­ered a mid­dle road:

1.5) Tell the stu­dent a so­lu­tion that's more com­pli­cat­ed than the prob­lem.

That way, if he fig­ures out the so­lu­tion, he has done the work, and if he does­n't fig­ure it out, it's go­ing to be so ob­vi­ous­ly be­yond his skill the teach­er will nev­er ac­cept it as an an­swer.

As an ex­am­ple, here's the prob­lem for which help was re­quest­ed:

Giv­en an un­sort­ed list of two-let­ter el­e­ments (une low­er­case, one up­per­case), for ex­am­ple:

['eD', 'fC', 'hC', 'iC', 'jD', 'bD', 'fH', 'mS', 'aS', 'mD']

Sort it by these cri­te­ri­a:

1. Cre­ate sub­sets ac­cord­ing to the up­per­case let­ter, and sort them by the num­ber of mem­bers in as­cend­ing or­der, like this:

   ['fH', 'mS', 'aS', 'fC', 'hC', 'iC', 'jD', 'bD', 'eD', 'mD']

2. Then sort each sub­set in as­cend­ing or­der of the low­er­case let­ter, like this:

   ['fH', 'aS', 'mS', 'fC', 'hC', 'iC', 'bD', 'eD', 'jD', 'mD']

Ig­nor­ing that the prob­lem is not cor­rect­ly writ­ten (there are at least two ways to read it, prob­a­bly more), I pro­posed this so­lu­tion, which re­quires python 3:

from collections import defaultdict
d1 = defaultdict(list)
[d1[i[1]].append(i) for i in  ['eD', 'fC', 'hC', 'iC', 'jD', 'bD', 'fH', 'mS', 'aS', 'mD']]
{i: d1[i].sort() for i in d1}
d2 = {len(d1[i]): d1[i] for i in d1}
print([item for sublist in [d2[i] for i in sorted(d2.keys())] for item in sublist])

This produces the desired result: ['fH', 'aS', 'mS', 'fC', 'hC', 'iC', 'bD', 'eD', 'jD', 'mD'] but it's done in such a way that to understand it, the student will need to understand roughly three or four things he has probably not been taught yet.