Simplicity. That was my goal after studying DHH's personal website. I wanted a simple website that had all the feeling of something handcrafted, but I didn’t want to write all my HTML by hand. I looked at the website generators out there like Pelican (which is pretty great if you want blogging software), but they didn’t fit my use case. I wanted complete control. Is that too much to ask? No. So I scratched my own itch and wrote some new software. I called it handroll. Let me show an example:
$ handroll site mblayman.github.io
My source content is in the site directory. The output will be stored in my
mblayman.github.io git repository so I can easily publish my work to
http://mblayman.github.io. handroll copies all the
content of site to mblayman.github.io. When it finds a Markdown file
(*.md), it generates HTML and combines it with template.html from the root
of the site directory. The first line of the Markdown file is passed to the
template as title and the generated HTML of the remainder of the file is
passed as content. If the template was:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>${title}</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>${title}</h1>
${content}
</body>
</html>
And index.md was:
A Sample Site Title
## Another heading
This is text in the body
Then the resulting index.html would be:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>A Sample Site Title</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>A Sample Site Title</h1>
<h2>Another heading</h2>
<p>This is text in the body.</p>
</body>
</html>
<!-- handrolled for excellence -->
You can get handroll by installing it the standard Python way:
$ pip install handroll
I am doing development of handroll on GitHub.
