Makesite.py -- an extremely simple (and extremely light) static site generator written in Python.

You write your content in text files and Makesite.py does the rest for you. It works by taking as input an HTML template, a CSS style, and a bunch of text files (in Markdown) and generating static HTML pages.

How it works

1. Download and place the following files into a folder:

   makesite.py -- the Python script to generate each webpage
   template.html -- the HTML skeleton of each webpage
   style.css -- the CSS style of each webpage
   index.md -- the text content of a webpage (Markdown)

2. Run:

   python makesite.py

This will generate an index.html that you can display with your browser.

Note that every time you make a modification you need to run python makesite.py again (that's what static site means).

What it is

Makesite.py is not a blog generator! If a blog is what you are looking for, there are a few dozen blog tools out there. Makesite.py was developed with the following concepts in mind:

• Extremely simple (very easy to understand and modify)
• No installation required (run it anywhere)
• No configuration required (you provide a text file, you get an HTML page)
• No templating language (just pure HTML, CSS and Python!)
• All functions in one single script (that you can actually understand)
• Navigation bar generated for you (customizable if you prefer)

If all you want is to simply put HTML content on the web (such as a personal webpage), then this might be the right tool for you.

Please note that this project is under development. Features are being added and modified.

Example

To get you started there is a full basic website example (with a Makefile included):

example/
   |__ Makefile
   |__ makesite.py 
   |__ template.html 
   |__ style.css
   |__ index.md 
   |__ first/ 
          |__ index.md 
   |__ second/ 
          |__ index.md 
   |__ third/ 
          |__ index.md 

To generate the HTML pages download the folder example, and run:

cd example
python makesite.py

or using the Makefile:

cd example
make site

Now all you have to do is replace the content of the Markdown files (.md) with your own. For each Markdown file an HTML page will be created and added to the navigation bar. Then you just upload the content of the example folder (the .html, .css, .jpg, etc.) to a web server/provider.

In the above example each webpage (Markdown file) is placed into a sub-folder to keep things organized (with the exception of the website's landing page, the 'Home' page), but you can have all the pages in the same folder if you prefer (just give them different names other than index.md).

To customize your website you can play around with the style.css and/or template.html (see how in the links below).

A Makefile is also provided for convenience. For example, on a Mac/Linux machine you can generate the website, display it on your browser, and upload it to GitHub by doing:

cd example  
make site
make show  
make git  

How to

Markdown
HTML
CSS

Questions/Comments? Send me an email: fspaolo@gmail.com