A new star is born.

Well ... stars ... there are many and most of them are not that bright either. But I was looking for something new to create a website with. That old horrible joomla/php thing broke apart after some php update (I don't remember which one) and was way to much for me either.

So I was looking for something fresh. As I already just uploaded static snapshots of the old php cms (via httrack and some sed+curl scripts), a static site compiler seemed like a very appealing idea to me.

A static site compiler does something really simple: It takes a number of input and configuration files, runs them through it's processing machinery and spits out a collection of HTML and auxiliary files (aka: a website ... you know like websites from the 90's). You can then simply upload and statically serve that site (or even publish it with your favourite VCS).

No PHP. No database. No security bugs. Simple, fast, static fileserving. Such a site might even survive that slashdot link on your average shared web host.

I tried a few existing ones but none of them was what I needed. When I have to install a dozen additional libraries (for which my distribution doesn't even have packages yet), before I get a tool up and running, there is something wrong. And there is also something wrong, when it pulls in some huge template engine for which I first have to learn a new language before I can get started.

So none of the tools I tried had all of the following properties:

• simple to use
• simple to install
• few dependencies
• supports blogging, rss feeds and simple pages
• low maintenance

I had an itch.

Now in a few weekends I hacked together a few hundred sloc of python sriptness. It's far from done, it's completely undocumented, it's not (yet) unittested. But it only needs a python runtime and it can already put together this blog :)

Stay tuned, there's more to come.