Frozen-Blog is a lightweight static blog, written in Python 3 as a Flask application. You know the gist: write posts in a markup language (e.g. Markdown), run them through a template system (e.g. Jinja2) and a static, ready to deploy website comes out.
It has everything you would expect, such as pagination, post tags, syntax highlighting and stand-alone pages. It's also a complete solution, including both the generator and a simple, elegant theme. Both are easy to customize.
Want to see what it looks like? click here.
Being based on Flask means that you get a builtin web server with auto reloading, an interactive debugger and easy configuration for everything.
By using Frozen-Flask, it's possible to generate the blog in a self-contained fashion (relative links only). It can also clean orphan files from previous builds. Dotfiles are ignored by default, so you can use repositories for both the source and target folders.
Finally, because it uses MetaFiles, pages and posts are lazily cached and reloaded when in live mode. This makes auto-regeneration fast, even with thousands of posts.
To install, make sure that you are using Python 3.3+ and install the dependencies. You need Frozen-Flask, Markdown, MetaFiles, and PyYAML. Install Pygments for syntax-highlighting (optional).
After that, clone this repository and run the builtin web server:
$ blog.py -s
* Running on http://127.0.0.1:8000/
* Restarting with reloaderEdit pages and posts, tinker with templates, modify anything. All changes
will be available instantly, just refresh your web browser. When ready,
issue blog.py -f to actually freeze the blog to disk.
See blog.conf and freezing.conf for configuration options (you can also
change those while live, the server will restart itself). The first one is always
loaded, freezing.conf is only loaded when freezing.
Frozen-Blog is tested on Windows 7 and 8 and on Debian (both x86 and x86-64) using Python 3.3+, Flask 0.10+ and Frozen-Flask 0.11+. I always use the latest MetaFiles from git. Older versions are not supported.
The encoding for pages and posts is UTF-8 with an optional BOM signature. It can be changed in the configuration files. Input can use any newline format. The output always uses Unix newlines (this is a Jinja2 default, it can be easily changed if needed).
The theme validates as standard HTML5 and CSS3. It looks the same on every browser (including IE6+). It uses em-based sizes. It does not depend on Javascript or any external CSS framework. Those are easy to add when needed.
This program is finished!
Frozen-Blog is feature-complete and has no known bugs. Unless issues are reported I plan no further development on it other than maintenance.
Like all my hobby projects, this is Free Software. See the Documentation folder for more information. No warranty though.