Item — HN Reader

I'd be more interested in this project if it had documentation.

Still I have spent several hours over the past few days reviewing various static site generators to see how well they fair against my own personal requirements:

* https://github.com/skx/static-site-generators

Perhaps unsurprisingly my own tool https://github.com/skx/templer is currently in the lead. The biggest failure I've seen with most of the static site generators I've reviewed has been complete failure to successfully handle symbolic links.

1 comments

Templer looks like something I could understand - I am not a programmer.

Suppose I had a tree of html snippets built up over time, and I added a new snippet and then issued the templer command. Would the html files of unchanged snippets have been 'touched'? Would 'assets' be re-copied?

I use lftp to selectively upload pages and their associated assets to a remote server.

I'm attempting to find something better than the bash script hacks I currently use...

I'm pleased that it seems understandable.

Templer has two modes of operation:

1. Files are processed/copied from beneath the input tree to the output tree.

2. Files are worked on "in-place".

In the latter case only files that need to be rebuilt are ever touched/modified/updated.

The same applies with the "input/ -> output/" mode of operation, but there is the caveat that I expect people run "make clean", or similar, every now and again. If you didn't, if you just re-ran it every now and again only the things that had changed, or were missing, would be updated.

(Assets are actually copied each time, if you're not running in-place, but we use tar to do it intelligently, so timestamps, etc wouldn't be changed unnecessarily.)

"...if you just re-ran it every now and again only the things that had changed, or were missing, would be updated."

Exactly the behaviour I was hoping for. I've 'cloned' your repository and will proceed to play. Thanks for making this generally available.

As per the other link there are a lot of these systems out there, each with different pros and cons. If you spot bugs or have suggestion please do drop me a mail/raise an issue.