Self-rolled blog generator using Mako

Over the last few days I've moved my blog from wordpress to a self-rolled blog software written in Python. The reason for moving away from WordPress is that I want to be able to edit a local copy of my content using an editor instead of doing it inside a browser. I also want to be able to use version control and tools like grep.

Before doing this I've looked at some existing systems and I started to wonder more and more how hard it would be to roll my own blog system, of course making use of existing components that do the work.

The first alternative I looked at was ikiwiki, a wiki compiler. Ikiwiki generates static content from text files using markdown. You can set it up as a blog system and has a module for leaving comments. I want to use a comment module but had a bad experience with wiki and blog spam. More over, my provider uses mod_perl which is not yet supported by ikiwiki.

Then, I came across this post about blogging with Git, Emacs, and Jekyll. Jekyll is written in Ruby and uses the Liquid template system. The Python port of Jekyll is named Hyde and uses Django templates. Anyway, this combination of tools seems powerful, but I got overwhelmed with the amount of technology I'm not familiar with. Yet, in the back of my mind I was still convinced I could make it simpler than that. So I though to myself, why not start from scratch and use a template system I am familiar with. And that's how Mako enters the picture. I started playing with Mako and with 50 lines of Python and a few simple templates I now have a blog with the most basic features.

Features:

• Posts are stored as individual Markdown files.
• A home page with the first n posts.
• Integrates with Disqus comment system.
• W3C compliant. Checked as XHTML 1.0 Strict.

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