Show HN: A dead simple static site generator – just two template tags

http://tags.brace.io

by colevscode • 12 years ago

94 76 12 years ago

tags.brace.io

What's the reason for this? Why don't you just build the website using standard HTML? Genuine question.

mikegioia• 12 years ago

This allows you to include other html files from within your templates. Instead of writing out the same <nav> and <header> html in every single file, you can just `include 'nav.html'`

eudox• 12 years ago

Templating.

CJefferson• 12 years ago

I was looking for something exactly like this just recently. Usually I use just php include when I want to just links some files together, but felt like I should stop using php as a preprocessor if possible.

However, everything else is so complicated if all you want is simple file inclusion.

newaccountfool3• 12 years ago

What's the reason behind not using PHP?

mokkol3• 12 years ago

partials :-)

try to have 1 header in like 10 pages. That is a lot of copy pasting :-)

pbhjpbhj• 12 years ago

I remember discovering SSI back when I was writing pages using pico/notepad .. was only a short hop then on to rejecting js client-side includes and using PHP for templating.

moondev3• 12 years ago

Reminded me of my go-to include method from back in the day: http://www.moock.org/webdesign/javascript/client-side-includ...

alanfalcon2• 12 years ago

Stupid question: any major drawbacks to using this method?

moondev3• 12 years ago

Lots.

The "include" file is just a js file that document.writes your html, so its not easy to make edits because you would need to do it in a big stream of escaped code.

They won't work if user has js turned off.

They are awful for seo because the includes will not be there when the page is crawled

They are not semantic for writing things like <html><head> and will throw your browser into quirks mode because your page would effectively start with a script tag.

But I used the hell out of them back when dynamic hosting was hard to come by (geocities, tripod etc)

Kiro• 12 years ago

I haven't read everything but why isn't the source like 10 lines if that's all it does?

icebraining5• 12 years ago

Reading the source, it also has a built-in web server (based on Python's SimpleHTTPServer) and a file watcher to automatically rebuild the site.

keithpeter• 12 years ago

So the watcher only writes files that have been edited unless there is a change to one of the repeated tag files?

iagooar• 12 years ago

Easy to use does not have anything to do with the underlying codebase.

kurrent2• 12 years ago

I'm not being facetious, but this "yet another static site generator" joins the list with 230+ other generators.

(see http://staticsitegenerators.net/)

Why do we need another one?

jedberg2• 12 years ago

Static site generators are the new Fibonacci generator. When you learn a language it's a fun little exercise, and possibly even useful.

Also, everyone has slightly different requirements, so everyone likes to build their own.

I will most likely soon build my own static site generator, because none of the ones out there do exactly what I want. I will most likely borrow from at least a few of the examples out there and then post it on my github so there is yet another one.

I think we're seeing a proliferation simply because it is so easy to share code these days. Imagine how many Fibonacci generators would have been out there if it were as easy to share code when those were popular (I want to say 10 years ago but maybe it was longer).

sillysaurus33• 12 years ago

    def fib(n):
        x  = ((1 + sqrt(5)) / 2) ** n
        x -= ((1 - sqrt(5)) / 2) ** n
        return x / sqrt(5)

irahul• 12 years ago

I will most likely soon build my own static site generator, because none of the ones out there do exactly what I want.

Why bother with the templating? Use Jinja2?

ianstormtaylor• 12 years ago

Had the same problem ourselves while building Segment.io that every static site generator was a bit too opinionated in weird ways, so we made Metalsmith[0]. Check it out, and you might not need to make your own anymore :)

[0] http://www.metalsmith.io/

bmj• 12 years ago

I've been looking at some of the options on that website, and this one seems to be less complex than many of the tools there. This isn't meant to be a blogging tool, but rather a simple way of emulating server-side includes or basic PHP includes in static HTML. I'm sure a few of those exist in that list, but when has "somebody built that already" become a gate for writing code?

workhere-io4• 12 years ago

Why do we need another one?

Because this one is much simpler to use than Jekyll and doesn't require you to install Ruby.

bryanlarsen• 12 years ago

You could use server side includes instead, which have been a feature of web servers for about 20 years now...

icebraining5• 12 years ago

Not if you host on S3, for example.

mehulkar• 12 years ago

Or on brace.io (aka Dropbox)

TheZenPsycho6• 12 years ago

A legitimate problem we're solving by… inventing a new templating language.

Did we need a new one to do this? Absolutely none of the hundreds of existing languages could have possibly worked, so let's reinvent SSI with different syntax?

TazeTSchnitzel• 12 years ago

Then just web spider SSI running on a local server.

Or someone should write an SSI static site generator.

oneeyedpigeon3• 12 years ago

A fine line, but static pages will be slightly faster than SSI.

Edit: Although what would be really nice would be the same kind of pre-processor that works with apache ssi directives

mantrax2• 12 years ago

They'll be infinitesimal faster for the server which will sit idle most of the time anyway... and much slower for you when you make a minor header/footer mod locally, and then you need to re-upload all pages that have a header (i.e. all pages).

I'm sorry, but this project feels more like "art" than a practical tool.

Plus, with a few basic lines of PHP (available on every shared host) you can pre-generate your site statically as well (and on the server, to save you the re-uploading).

TheZenPsycho6• 12 years ago

mod_disk_cache and mod_mem_cache make that pretty irrelevant.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_disk_cache.html

re:edit hxincl uses a similar style as ssi but with a couple of enhancements:

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/en/man1/hxincl.1....

if you want exactly SSI syntax, ain't nuthin' stopping you from pointing curl at localhost.

steve_barham• 12 years ago

Not Invented Here syndrome, at all? Sure, I understand wanting to use Python for templates rather than relying on an external application. But why ignore the many, many existing template libraries? Some of those libraries have solved problems which you don't realise you have yet.

Case in point, are you planning to support this 'dead simple' template language for users of your hosting site? If so, what happens if I try to include something outside the site root, in a Dropbox area which I control? https://github.com/braceio/tags/blob/master/tags/tags.py#L13

colevscode2• 12 years ago

Fair point. Python was chosen because it's an accessible language for new programmers. As for template languages, most are very complex. We wanted something minimal.

As for that case, it won't work and we'll try to help you reorganize your content so it does. :)

tghw2• 12 years ago

Don't use easy_install.

http://stackoverflow.com/a/3220572/2363

sillysaurus33• 12 years ago

I wonder when pip will be considered old and outdated?

yeukhon3• 12 years ago

It won't, not for a long time. http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0453/ and http://blog.python.org/2014/03/python-340-released.html

colevscode2• 12 years ago

We totally agree, and use pip and virtual envs for everything.

However we chose python, and easy_install because it's pre-installed all macbooks going back to snow leopard. (specifically python 2.6.1 which comes with distutils needed for our setup.py file) This means for many web designers, brace-tags doesn't require that you update your python install, or really know python at all. It's the simplest command line install experience we could come up with.

yeukhon3• 12 years ago

Intention is good, but anyone who wish to do serious development wouldn't mind that extra step.

Make my point clear: think about sudo pip install X vs advocating everyone to use virtualenv. The cost of cleaning up any mess from sudo outweigh the cost of getting pip and virtualenv.

Look. I agree that getting new package install is painful. Even on Linux, I often have to add PPA to get the latest version.

sdegutis• 12 years ago

As a typical dev, I have no idea how to uninstall things that were installed via easy_install, especially when it was thrown into the places sudo lets it go. So every time I see `sudo easy_install`, I just close the page I'm on.

tghw2• 12 years ago

Then suggest pip first. If they need pip, they can easy_install it.

LouisSayers• 12 years ago

I like it! Great concept, thanks for simplifying something that should be dead easy and simple. A ruby port would be nice.

rooodini• 12 years ago

I actually found the “Highlight this” example at the top a bit confusing. Could you write “Display this” instead? Or give a better example to demonstrate conditionals?

laurent123456• 12 years ago

I've been using PHP to generate static HTML pages. It's usually as simple as `php somepage.php > somepage.html` and you have all the advantages of a full featured language.

workhere-io4• 12 years ago

Very nice and easy to use.

dangayle• 12 years ago

I like this very much. I used to do very similar with PHP, but I'm now a Python dev. Sometimes, just sometimes, writing plain old simple html is easier, and having a basic include would save a ton of heartache for maintenance.

epsylon• 12 years ago

I'm willing to bet that it took more time to write and setup the homepage than to write the generator itself.

workhere-io4• 12 years ago

Is there any way you could make the watch feature not dependant on watchdog? The watchdog installation fails on pip on Mac. I then had to install Homebrew just to be able to install libyaml, which then meant I could install watchdog.

xixixao2• 12 years ago

Which is why this should have been written in Node. Seriously, Python/Ruby environments+package managers are the abomination of programmer's time.

workhere-io4• 12 years ago

I disagree. This is the only time I've ever had any problems with Python package managers.

dolphenstein• 12 years ago

Awesome! Just what I needed this morning.

Show HN: A dead simple static site generator – just two template tags

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