A static site generator is a bit of code which takes input files, for instance from Markdown files or from another source on the web, and builds a website from it. For it to be static, the website is usually just plain HTML. Static site generators are handy because they remove a lot of the complexity of using a server based site such as Wordpress or a custom Django blog, and instead let you just focus on the content. They are better than traditional HTML web pages because they let you apply templates to style your HTML pages just like any other server based site.

When I needed to make a manual for the data acquisition system I have been building, I decided I wanted to write the content in Markdown and use a static site generator to build the web pages for me. These pages (when ready) can then be dropped onto a web server or github pages.

In this video use Python, Jinja2 and Markdown2 to build a simple static site generator for my website…

#python