Hyde, the static web generator
—So, I needed a small Christmas project, and a place to dump some random thoughts, what would be a better place than a simple blog. When I say simple I mean static HTML, preferably served from Amazon S3.
After taking a look at the Python-based options, I found Pelican, which seemed really nice, but I quickly noticed that it is AGPL-licensed. Second best alternative was Hyde which is MIT-licensed. As liberal licensing appeal a lot to me, the choice was easy to make.
The standard design template certainly needed a bit of work (and it is by no means done) but is now in an acceptable state.
For publishing to S3, I didn’t like the complexity of the S3 addon publishers that were available so I decided to use a s3cmd instead, making it a one line deploy:
s3cmd sync deploy/ s3://<bucket-name>/
And thats it, very easy. Also, s3cmd sync uses the etag/md5 of files making sure to only upload files that have changed on subsequent deploys.