Sunday, November 29, 2009

Karmic Koala

I've decided to install Ubuntu 9.10 last Friday. This was done rashly as I simply chucked my version 8.04 and everything it contained. All of this is necessary because I want to develop a web site for the East Coast Go Camp, which I am running next year. This will be a "learning process" as I know didley-squat about web design. Just about anything I write will be an improvement over the existing web site.

For this project, I intend to use Hyde - a static web-site generator. Hopefully, this hides some of the HTML/CSS dirty work in developing a nice-looking web site. Judging from the web-site of the author, I should get a good result.

To install, Lakshmivyas suggests I use easy-install to put in everything. As his instructed say "sudo easy-install this and that", his assuming you have Linux of some kind. (Which I do... um... right.) Specifically he wants you to easy-install django, pyYAML and markdown. Instead of using easy-install, I decided to use pip.

I realize that I should try to understand what I am installing.


Django


Django is a python based web framework in which you can create and manage dynmically generated content on the web.

pyYAML


YAML Ain't Markup Language is a human friendly data serialization standard for all programming languages. It is a systematic way of encoding all the structure of an data in a manner readable to humans and independent of the programming language. It is like Json or XML.

markdown


markdown is a formatting syntax meant to be easier to use than HTML and it a Perl programming which converts this script into HTML.


Hyde


Hyde is a static website generator created by a Python developer in India.

Static websites are saved to the server and all users receive the same copy into their browser. Recently, a lot of attention has been given to dynamic web sites, created upon request by customizing "templates" with user input, which feels interactive.
Hyde is based on Django, which is supposed to be for creating dynamic sites. I am guessing you keep all your templates at home, updating your static website template and upload it yourself onto the server.

Probably with the help of Markdown, it will be a lot less work for the web designer, while YAML is used to keep all the data organized.