How This Site is Made

In December 2011 I significantly revised how I produce this site. I began several years ago writing page content for my site in a lightweight markup language (LML). I first used txt2tags markup and processing, using a programming text editor, Crimson Editor, to prepare the marked-up, plain text source files. I switched to the editor WriteMonkey because it allowed me to use markdown, the LML that I find suits my style best. WriteMonkey also generated HTML directly from the editor. That, however, was less flexible than txt2tags, which allows variable directives to be incorporated easily. The journey through txt2tags and WriteMonkey is recorded in my legacy site. There is lots of good information there about those programs. If you have an interest in them, you should definitely visit.

Exporting the HTML version of a page directly from the editor as I could with WriteMonkey seemed efficient. WriteMonkey allowed control over page formatting through applied stylesheets. It turned out, however, that if I wanted to change the formatting, it was tedious to load each source file into WriteMonkey and re-export the HTML. A programmer could have avoided this by writing a program to change the HTML of all the files in the site directory at once, but I'm not a programmer. So I went looking for something that would allow me to generate the entire site more or less automatically. I found it in poole.

As the description from the poole site says,

Poole is an easy to use Markdown driven static website generator. You write the content of your pages in Markdown and Poole creates a nice and simple site with a navigation menu. You don't need to learn a template or preprocessing engine.

So I have now converted to generating my site using poole. It's easy, gives my site a consistent look (on those pages where I want a consistent look), and is flexible in using CSS. Right now, the CSS is a minor modification of the example stylesheet that is downloaded with the poole script. I'll probably update it later and that is one of the beauties of poole. I have only to revise the CSS file or the template file and re-generate the entire site with one command to poole.

Poole also allows variables through the use of embedded, inline Python. My next challenge is to learn enough Python to be able to use that power. :-)

Last updated: 2011-12-20