Last night I saw this post by James Hard­ing ex­plain­ing how to make a sim­ple stat­ic blog us­ing Flask.

It got me think­ing... how hard would it be, and how much code would it take, to write the same func­tion­al­i­ty with as few de­pen­den­cies as pos­si­ble?

So, in­stead of break­fast and lunch I got a cof­fee and a sand­wich, and you guys get Nico­let­ta a min­i­mal­is­tic stat­ic blog gen­er­a­tor.

The de­pen­den­cies are:

• Mark­­down

• PyYaml

• livereload (op­­tion­al, on­­ly need­ed if you want the same cool au­­to reload Niko­la has

And how much code was it? I had guessed 25 lines, and was off by a lot, it's 40. I could cheat a lit­tle and bring it down to 25, but hey, what's the point?

The code is up at github and should be self ex­plana­to­ry. If it's not, just ask here in the com­ments.

Fi­nal­ly! This took a while be­cause there was a lot of work done, but re­lease 6.0.0 of Niko­la my stat­ic site and blog gen­er­a­tor is out.

De­tail­s, files, etc at github

I have tried, for this re­lease, to do things bet­ter, be more care­ful and doc­u­ment as much as pos­si­ble, as well as tried to hit most things that were hard to fix in a sin­gle back­wards in­com­pat­i­ble break.

Some of the new fea­tures are de­scribed in a se­ries of blog post­s: 1 2 3 4 5

Al­so: brand new mod­ern themes site: http://themes.get­niko­la.­com and new do­main http://get­niko­la.­com among many oth­er tweak­s.

Have fun!

A long time ago I wrote a hack­ish min­i­mal­is­tic fo­rum soft­ware, which used Dis­qus as a back­end. Just to see if it still worked af­ter 2.5 years, I took a look... and it sort of did.

So, since I know much more about web­sites now than I did back then, I cleaned it up a lit­tle and de­ployed it at http://­fo­rum.ralsi­na.me

Most­ly, what I have learned in those 2.5 years is that boot­strap and JQuery are cool, and here is the be­fore/after im­age so you can see why.

And yes, it's still 32 lines of code. I re­moved a com­ment be­cause Dis­qus works bet­ter now and the rest is all tem­plate changes, done us­ing http://­jet­strap.­com

I am plan­ning to do a ma­jor re­lease (ver­sion 6!) of Niko­la my stat­ic blog and site gen­er­a­tor the next week­end. It's a ma­jor ver­sion be­cause there has been a ton of fea­ture work done. So, I will do a quick se­ries high­light­ing some of those im­prove­ments this week.

I am plan­ning to do a ma­jor re­lease (ver­sion 6!) of Niko­la my stat­ic blog and site gen­er­a­tor the next week­end. It's a ma­jor ver­sion be­cause there has been a ton of fea­ture work done. So, I will do a quick se­ries high­light­ing some of those im­prove­ments this week.