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            <p>The hell with Jekyll and Hyde and Cactus. There is something far better. Too bad they couldn't pick a cool name for it. It's called <a href="http://mynt.mirroredwhite.com/quickstart/">mynt</a>. From what I have seen of it so far, the only thing that sucks about it is the name.</p>
            <p>None of the big names mentioned above worked out of the box when used with the dump of my photo blog's posts. The dump was generated with the <a href="https://github.com/benbalter/wordpress-to-jekyll-exporter">WP to Jekyll exporter</a>. Mynt on the other hand had no problems and even processed the whole set of files rather quickly without any complaints.</p>
            <p>Another plus point is that that their template language is <a href="http://jinja.pocoo.org/">Jinja</a> which is an even more powerfull system than the default template engine for &nbsp;Django. Now after a lengthy delay, I am finally one step closer to getting rid of Wordpress.</p>
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mynt

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            <p>Update Feb 16: If you came looking for a solution to a template error in the title; &nbsp;see this <a href="http://raditha.com/blog/archives/django.template.base.templatesyntaxerror-block-tag-takes-only-one-argument-2.html">link</a> for the solution. This post is about static blog generators.</p>
            <p>Still blogging with wordpress despite my repeated assurances that I am moving away from it. This time my excuse is the error message in the title. In the previous post, we talked about Cactus, Volt and Cactus blog. That discussion was left off with a character encoding error.</p>
            <p>UnicodeDecodeError: ‘ascii’ codec can’t decode byte 0xe2 in position 772: ordinal not in range(128). — Note: Markdown only accepts unicode input!</p>
            <p>This is becuase "Python-Markdown expects&nbsp;<strong>Unicode</strong>&nbsp;as input (although a simple ASCII string may work) and returns output as Unicode." (<a href="https://packages.python.org/Markdown/reference.html">python markdown docs</a>). Less said about unicode support in PHP 5 and wordpress the better. So let's talk about adapting our input. That can be managed by a slight mod to the markdown.py file. Here is the diff:</p>
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            After Punching &nbsp;Jekyll and Hyde, it was time to look at alternative static blog generator. Something that I came across in the process is <a href="https://github.com/koenbok/Cactus">Cactus</a>. It looks rather promising, unfortunately as with many open source projects the documentation is somewhat scarce. Still for all this is python which means I can dig through the code, or so I thought until I ran across this curious error in markdown:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 772: ordinal not in range(128). -- Note: Markdown only accepts unicode input!</span></p>
            I know there is nothing wrong with the markdown because the same file was processed without any glitches by Jekyll. Al that the offending line in the markdown plugin does is:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">html = md.convert(f.read())</p>
            Seriously?

            Next up I tried <a href="https://github.com/bow/volt">volt</a>&nbsp;and predictably encountered another issue with the markdown. This time the complaint is that the time attribute is missing from the front matter. The input in both cases is the same set of files from the wordpress export. The export was created with the <a href="https://github.com/benbalter/wordpress-to-jekyll-exporter">wordpress to jekyll exporter</a>&nbsp;.

            &nbsp;

            Update feb 17: I returned to Volt on feb 17, tried to process the markdown files produced by exitwp, volt still chokes on it.

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Cactus Volt

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            <p>Does <a href="https://jekyllrb.com/">Jekyll</a> power this blog now &nbsp;the like I promised it would? short answer is I am working on it. The long answer is below.</p>
            <p>Jekyll is easy to install and get started by to go beyond an absolute bear bones site or blog you need plugins. Plenty of plugins. As with any good open source eco system, there &nbsp;is always more than one plugin that does the same thing. The trouble is to figure out which one is the best for the task at hand. Ever been to a&nbsp;restaurant&nbsp;where you couldn't decide what to order because the menu had far too many choices in it? So you end up asking the waiter to recommend something which turns out to be just awful?</p>
            <p>Now this is the very thing with Wordpress. Whenever you want wordpress to behave differently from the default (and the default is unusable), there is no choice but to download a plugin. The alternative, editing the&nbsp;spaghetti&nbsp;code is the stuff of nightmares. So messing with too many plugins is something I would rather avoid whether it's Wordpress or Jekyll.</p>
            <p>So in spite of my aversion to Node.js I decided to give Punch a try. Installation was a piece of cake and same could be said about setting up a simple site, but here is the catch, the default template system is Mustache, which I don't like. I want something that supports a little bit of logic. Now to look elsewhere maybe Hyde. Now I hasten to add that there is nothing wrong with Punch, it's just Node.js and Mustache that goes against my religion.</p>
            <p>There is a lot &nbsp;of confusion over Hyde because there are two projects named Hyde by the same user on <a href="https://github.com/search?q=hyde&amp;ref=commandbar">github</a>. When you are reading a blog post or article on Hyde, you are never quite sure which version they are talking about. Even the most recent project '<a href="https://github.com/hyde/hyde">githyb/hyde/hyde</a>', hasn't been updated in nearly a year. &nbsp;A project that has not been recently updated is that way because it's either extremely stable and feature complete or abandoned.</p>
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Monthly Archives for 2013 01

mynt

django.template.base.TemplateSyntaxError: 'block' tag takes only one argument

Cactus Volt

Jekyll and Hyde (and punch)