For some rea­son to­day I got in­to a lit­tle spat with Zed Shaw which end­ed with me blocked af­ter a bar­rage of ver­bal abuse.

So, he says I am a dick­head. Is it so? Here's the ex­change in an im­age, and here it is on twit­ter:

It seems to me it's most­ly a case of some­one be­ing quick to dish abuse but slow to ac­cept dis­agree­men­t. But hey, maybe I am a dick­head for say­ing that. That con­ver­sa­tion had a few oth­er branch­es, but those were dis­agree­ments about the top­ic (in which, I have to say, Zed is com­plete­ly clue­less, and wrong, al­though IANAL) Find­ing them all may be too much ef­fort but here's one

The Python Ar­genti­na group or­ga­nizes lots of events. Like, half a dozen ev­ery year, or more. Those in­clude mul­ti­-­day events like Py­Cam­p, larg­er con­fer­ences like Py­Con, and sev­er­al Py­Days.

Py­Days are spe­cial, they are usu­al­ly sin­gle-­track, just one day (ob­vi­ous­ly), free, and or­ga­nized at uni­ver­si­ties, for stu­dents, and of­ten by stu­dents. And one stum­bling block is usu­al­ly how to set­up the web in­fra­struc­ture for one. There is a we­b2py app cre­at­ed by Mar­i­ano Rein­gart, but I feel it's overkil­l. Al­so, set­ting up host­ing, databas­es, cus­tomiza­tion­s, etc. is a lot of work!

So, I de­cid­ed, prod­ded by Juan Ro­driguez Mon­ti, to see how much can be done with­out set­ting up com­plex things. And I think it's quite a lot. Based on Niko­la my stat­ic site gen­er­a­tor, I cre­at­ed a tem­plate site for small events, like Py­Days, called Niko­la Event Kit

The goal is that you should be able to set­up ba­sic con­tent, signup for­m, sched­ule, and the ob­vi­ous need­ed things in one day. And then you can al­lo­cate an­oth­er day or more for cus­tomiz­ing the look of the site.

And then you are done, no need to de­ploy any­thing oth­er than plain HTM­L.

If you want to test-­drive it, here's a de­mo site and here is the code ready for you to fork in­to your own even­t's site.

Have fun!