I just re­leased ver­sion 3 of my stat­ic site gen­er­a­tor, Niko­la

It's a ma­jor re­lease, there is hard­ly any code from the pre­vi­ous ver­sion that was not moved, prod­ded, bro­ken or fixed!

The main fea­tures of Niko­la:

• Blogs, with tags, feed­s, archives, com­­ments, etc.

• Themable

• Fast build­s, thanks to doit

• Flex­i­ble

• Small code­base (pro­­gram­mers can un­der­­s­tand all of Niko­la in a few hours)

• re­Struc­­tured­­Text and Mark­­down as in­­put lan­guages

• Easy im­age gal­­leries (just drop files in a fold­er!)

• Syn­­tax high­­­light­ing for al­­most any pro­­gram­ming lan­guage or markup

• Mul­ti­lin­gual sites

• Does­n't rein­vent wheel­s, lev­er­ages ex­ist­ing tool­s.

Changes for this re­lease (not ex­haus­tive!):

• New op­­tion­al tem­­plate ar­gu­­ment for "niko­la init"

• New "in­stal­l_the­me" task

• Op­­tion­al ad­­dress op­­tion for the "serve" task

• Bet­ter look­ing code­blocks

• Rus­sian tran­s­la­­tion

• Use mark­­down/reSt com­pil­er based on post ex­ten­­sion

• Don't fail when there are no post­s/s­­to­ries/­­gal­­leries/­­tags

• Use con­­fig­u­ra­­tion op­­tions as de­pen­­den­­cies

• Use more rel­a­­tive links for eas­i­er site rel­lo­ca­­tion

• Syn­­tax high­­­light for mark­­down

• Bet­ter mul­ti­­core builds (make the -n 2 or -n 4 op­­tions work)

• Con­­fig­urable out­­put fold­er

• Don't fail on posts with pe­ri­ods in the name

• Dif­fer­­ent page names for dif­fer­­ent lan­guages

• Rec­og­nize (some) Mako tem­­plate de­pen­­den­­cies

• Is now a more "nor­­mal" python pack­­age.

It has been said that if noone hates you, you are do­ing it wrong. I must be do­ing it quite wrong be­cause there seem to be a lot of peo­ple who like me, for some rea­son. For ex­am­ple, to­day I was in a dark mood all af­ter­noon. I wrote ag­gres­sive stuff on twit­ter and IR­C.

And what do I get? Peo­ple ask­ing me what was wrong and of­fer­ing help. It's un­fair. Un­fair to them be­cause they should not be sub­ject to the moods of any ass­hole (in­clud­ing me). I can on­ly claim, in the way of ex­cus­es, that my wife no longer works next to me all day.

If she were there, and saw me act­ing like that, she would have slapped me back in­to sen­si­ble be­hav­iour by re­mind­ing me that I am a lucky bas­tard. She does­n't even have to say any­thing, she just has to be there. So, she ar­rived, I no­ticed I am a lucky bas­tard, and I am all mel­low now.

So, if I act­ed like a bas­tard with you to­day, or any oth­er day, sor­ry dude, I am a bit of a bas­tard. But I am a lucky one, and when I don't for­get that, I am, I think, bear­able.

Ser­gio de la Pa­va is Neal Stephen­son with law and bull­shit in­stead of com­put­ers and sword­s.

—Rober­to Alsi­na

But there are al­so swords in A Naked Sin­gu­lar­i­ty!

—Le­vi Stahl

A while ago I fin­ished read­ing "A naked sin­gu­lar­i­ty" by Ser­gio de la Pa­va.

If you have not read it, stop read­ing this now, take a week off and read it first. You may love me for telling you that, or you may hate me with the in­ten­si­ty of a thou­sand sun­s, but I doubt you will find it in you to say "me­h" af­ter you do.

I will try not to go in­to plot de­tail­s, even though it's per­haps im­pos­si­ble to spoil this book. If I told you how it end­s, it would not make any dif­fer­ence. If I told you about the chim­p, or about the Ca­sio Carousel, it may not mat­ter. Or maybe it was a mon­key, and the Carousel is done by Sony. Which it is, in the book. By Sony, not a mon­key. I think.

Re­mem­ber that kid in school that could tell the best jokes, and he did those fun­ny voic­es? De la Pa­va writes in fun­ny voic­es. And he breaks your heart with fun­ny voic­es. His book does­n't me­an­der, it goes straight and quick, de­ter­mined and in a hur­ry right out to the mid­dle of nowhere, then keeps go­ing, goes of­froad, keeps go­ing, runs through a few wall­s, and comes back here, by just go­ing and go­ing. It has a mo­tor, it has a rock­et en­gine, it nev­er blinks.

This book is os­ten­si­bly about a lawyer stray­ing his path. It's prob­a­bly writ­ten about some­thing else. I have this strange feel­ing that most char­ac­ters are imag­i­nary, even though they talk and feel very re­al to me, who am writ­ing this and thus am sup­posed to be more re­al than they are. It's hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry grit­ty re­al­is­m. It's po­et­ic and tech­ni­cal. It's bull­shit as an art for­m.

Which is, re­al­ly, what at­tract­ed me to it. The di­alog, the mono­logues, are to reg­u­lar bull­shit like fine din­ners are to hot dogs. Ser­gio de la Pa­va may be the finest bull­shit-­giv­er in this blue plan­et of ours (take it from one dab­bler in the art), and we are all lucky to have him writ­ing.

UP­DATE: How could I for­get to men­tion that this book, this nov­el, has some of the best box writ­ing since Mail­er? It's an in­cred­i­ble feat, and I just for­got about it be­cause there is so much stuff in it.

And yes, it has swords in it.