electric is a static site generator that I use to generate my personal website. It's also the name of the markup language that I use to decorate my blog posts. My original website ran on Jekyll, but it felt too clunky and overpowered for my needs. Because Jekyll has a lot of dependencies (such as Liquid), it was sometimes frustrating to debug and I always thought that a static site generator wouldn't be that hard to make. Well, I was wrong - this was pretty hard to make.
electric is extremely specific to my blogging workflow, and while there are plans to extend functionality of both the language and the site generator, I don't really have any intention of extending it past my own needs.
The electric language is just a simple macro language - similar to Markdown. The syntax is pretty Lisp-y, but that's because I only really know how to make Lisp-y interpreters. In terms of style, it's a combination of Markdown and LaTeX. The tokenizer, parser, and interpreters are all homemade, so no dependencies too!
The main way to use electric is with the following syntax: @operation{arg1||arg2||...||argn}. For example, to bold a piece of text, do @b{a piece of text}. For functions with arity greater than 1 e.g. links, do @link{someURL.com||a description of the URL}. And that's it! You can define you own macros by going into lang/program.py and adding your desired function into the standard environment.
electric works in a really simple way. You define source and target paths in the config.json file, and electric builds the files according to the templates in the templates/ folder. That's it! (By the way, electric only builds source files that end in the .electric extension).
Do you want a good feedback loop in your blogging workflow? Running python main.py builds the files in real-time, allowing you to get instant feedback about how your writing looks on the webpage itself.
Similar to the language, electric the site generator has almost no dependencies, other than watchdog. Just pip install watchdog, and you're good to go.
There are three commands for the command line tool: electric help, electric shock, electric new <post_name> [-single | -multiple]. electric help gives you exactly what you want: help. electric shock does the same thing as what other static site generators do: building the source. I just wanted to have fun with the name.
electric new <args> sets up a new electric project. Doing electric new <project_name> -single generates the file structure below. The -single tag sets up a disposable single page document:
lib/
├─ templates/
│ ├─ post_template.html
├─ new.electric
posts/
├─ index.html
├─ index.css
config.json
electric new <project_name> -multiple generates the file structure below. The -multiple tag sets up a multi-page website:
lib/
├─ templates/
│ ├─ post_template.html
│ ├─ post_index_template.html
├─ posts/
│ ├─ new.electric
posts/
├─ index.html
├─ index.css
├─ post-content/
│ ├─ new.html
config.json