Prototyping with staticjinja

I’ve started building a website for a friend of mine, who works for an organisation called Talitha.

I wanted to get something up and running quickly (since I figured a website was better than no website), so I just started playing with Bootstrap. From there, I had an idea of what I wanted the site to look like, and all was well. I threw up a single page site that introduced the organisation a little bit.

Problem is, then I had to make a second page.

I didn’t want to repeat myself (because I’m obsessive like that), and I didn’t feel like setting something up with Pelican.

I really just wanted to use Jinja, and extend a base template somewhere. I started looking for a library that would let me do that, and came across staticjinja.

It didn’t quite do what I wanted, so I wrote a few patches for it:

1. Added support for static files (which now get copied from a source directory to an output directory).
2. Added a standalone build script (called staticjinja) to avoid needing any custom Python script to build my site.

All this (which took about a week of train journeys…) meant I could write that second page, without ever repeating myself.

It took a lot longer than just copying and pasting that first page, but I’ve never been one to shy away from yak shaving.