About
In Spring 2012, I decided it was time to revise my personal website. I ended up writing a very lightweight content management system.
Implementation
Each page is written in Markdown.
To see the Markdown version of a page, replace .html with .md
in the URL. For example, here is this page's Markdown source.
A small Python script named webgen searches through the directory
structure for files with the .md extension. It converts each into
HTML, then adds a standard header and footer.
Finally, the entire website is stored as a Git repository, based on
this guide. A server-side
post-commit hook runs webgen whenever changes are pushed. Only
the Markdown files are versioned; the HTML files are regenerated whenever
their dependancies change.
Update
As of May 2014, webgen is no more:
130 lines of Python were replaced by a 25-line Makefile.
In my non-scientific testing, it runs about 3x faster (with -j8).