A New Blog (& Engine)

Since the world needs more static site generators (it doesn’t), I built one. It’s not “all things for all people”. Not a 747, just a tiny ultralight to automate some things.

Its goals are simple:

1. Maintain a list of finished posts & unfinished ideas
2. Render finished posts into an HTML template
3. Do as little else as possible

The script is altogether ≈130 lines of Python code, and probably won’t ever be much larger (hopefully I’ll cut it down some). I chose markdown formatting, and Jinja2 for templating. My preferred editor (for prose/markdown) is iA Writer, and the site is deployed to S3.

I’m calling it unn because naming things is hard.

Invoked from the command line, it knows how to do 3 things:

• unn idea post-slug - start a new draft called “post-slug”
• unn build - convert “published” files into an HTML site
• unn deploy - deploy the site to S3 (& build it first)

To “publish” a post, I simply move the file from /ideas into /posts, and run unn deploy

It’s not perfect, but if I wait until it is, I’ll be waiting forever. You can find it on GitHub.