Sanity check a website construction plan please

[JonJ678]

I'm thinking of writing a basic website as a portfolio / cv / code host. The main requirement is to minimise the book-keeping work involved as otherwise it won't get updated. I've written html by hand and don't want to do so again.

The obvious way to do this is to write each page / section in plain text & run it through a program which generates html / javascript from these files. Probably python because I like python. The text, images & python scripts would be under source control.

Is this obvious-to-me method anywhere near best practice? I'd like to be able to write a new article then type "make" to see it appear online in an appropriate place on the site.

I'm new to web stuff

 

[Phunky]

Building static files might not be the correct approach - will you ever need to edit these in the future or use the data for other functionality (reporting for example?). If so then use of a DB with server side rendering will be more flexible.

But you certainly could do as you've describe, i've not used much python myself but hyde is a static site generator for python - http://ringce.com/hyde

 

[unwashed potato!]

sorry can you re-iterate what you're looking to use the website for? i'm not exactly sure so dont' want to give bad advice

 

[JonJ678]

Good point guys - the OP is rather vague.

At present I'm writing sparsely documented code to implement various numerical algorithms. Most are derived from those in the literature. Some of the code is proprietary but some is not - for example I'm doing some work with a legacy Fortran application where the legacy code is proprietary yet the testing library I'm building for it is not.

I would like to use said website to record references, design decisions, various mathematics. I'll also put various sections of source code online. This is partly for the benefit of anyone working in a similar field and partly to motivate me to actually write the documentation. Said documentation should change periodically.

At present everything I do is stored in SQL databases courtesy of Fossil source control. As such, storing website and images in SQL and rendering from that sounds reasonable - though I'd still prefer to generate html from templates than write it from first principles.

Regenerating the html/javascript whenever anyone requests a page from the server sounds rather inefficient relative to generating static pages once - but I freely admit I'm ignorant in this field.

Cheers

 

[AJK]

Just use a basic CMS (WordPress, etc.), or for that matter a wiki (MediaWiki, etc.), since it sounds like you're building a knowledge base of sorts. Would that not be easiest?