Moving to Hyde
October 28, 2010
For the last few years my website has been running on a custom made PHP (eew) 'blog engine'. Nowadays I prefer to code my websites using Python and Django.
However, Django is quite memory intensive (for my 128MB RAM vps server that is) and it's way to advanced for a simple blog and some static pages anyway. So I decided to take a different road.
Hyde
A while ago, I came across Hyde:
Hyde is a static website generator powered by Python & Django. Hyde supports all the Django template tags & filters and even has a few of its own. The built-in web server + auto-generator provide instant refresh and unlimited flexibility.
Sounds pretty cool. Basically you can write your blogpost in your favorite texteditor using a markup language of your choice and you can create pages by defining Django templates. All content and templates are then 'compiled' to static HTML pages.
Unfortunately, moving to Hyde has been a bit of a bumpy road. Partly due to a limited amount of documentation available and partly due to some bugs I encountered. It took me a bit more time then I had expected, but now I've figured everything out it's a breeze to work with. There are a few open source Hyde websites (Steve Losh for example) which have been very helpful to figure out Hyde. Thanks guys!
What's next?
Front-end wise the site is mostly done now. I am planning to try out some new stuff for my Hyde setup. LessCSS (or any of the alternatives) look very interesting, I've always hated the huge violation of the DRY principle in CSS and it looks like LessCSS and the like could solve this problem.
Your experiences with Hyde
So what do you think about Hyde? Did you move to Hyde? How did it work out for you? You can tell me about it in the comments, I wonder how other people are finding Hyde.
