If you see this, you may no­tice some changes in the site.

So, here is a short ex­pla­na­tion:

• I changed the soft­­ware and the tem­­plates for this blog.

• Yes, it's a work in progress.

• The new soft­­ware is called Niko­la.

• Yes, it's pret­­ty cool.

Why change?

Are you kid­ding? My pre­vi­ous blog-­gen­er­a­tor (Son of Bartle­Blog) was not in good shape. The ar­chives on­ly cov­ered 2000-2010, the "pre­vi­ous post­s" links were a lot­tery, and the span­ish ver­sion of the site was miss­ing whole sec­tion­s.

So, what's Nikola?

Niko­la is a stat­ic web­site gen­er­a­tor. One thing about this site is that it is, and has al­ways been, just HTM­L. Ev­ery "dy­nam­ic" thing you see in it, like com­ments, is a third par­ty ser­vice. This site is just a bunch of HTML files sit­ting in a fold­er.

So, how does Nikola work?

Niko­la takes a fold­er full of txt files writ­ten in re­struc­tured text, and gen­er­ates HTML frag­ments.

Those frag­ments plus some light meta­da­ta (ti­tle, tags, de­sired out­put file­name, ex­ter­nal links to sources) and Some Mako Tem­plates cre­ate HTML pages.

Those HTML pages use boot­strap to not look com­plete­ly bro­ken (hey, I nev­er claimed to be a de­sign­er).

To make sure I don't do use­less work, doit makes sure on­ly the re­quired files are recre­at­ed.

Why not use <whatever>?

Be­cause, for di­verse rea­son­s, I want­ed to keep the ex­act URLs I have been us­ing:

• If I move a page, keep­­ing the Dis­­qus com­­ments at­­tached gets tricky

• Some peo­­ple may have book­­marked them

Al­so, I want­ed:

• Mako tem­­plates (be­­cause I like Mako)

• Re­struc­­tured text (Be­­cause I have over 1000 posts writ­ten in it)

• Python (so I could hack it)

• Easy to hack (cur­ren­t­­ly Niko­la is un­der 600 LOC, and is al­­most fea­­ture com­­plete)

• Sup­­port for a mul­ti­lin­gual blog like this one.

And of course:

• It sound­ed like a fun, short pro­jec­t. I had the sus­pi­­cion that with a bit of glue, ex­ist­ing tools did 90% of the work. Looks like I was right, since I wrote it in a few days.

Are you going to maintain it?

Sure, since I am us­ing it.

Is it useful for other people?

Prob­a­bly not right now, be­cause it makes a ton of as­sump­tions for my site. I need to clean it up a bit be­fore it's re­al­ly nice.

Can other people use it?

Of course. It will be avail­able some­where soon.

Missing features?

No tags yet. Some oth­er mi­nor miss­ing things.