About Cyblog
Cyblog is a “blog aware, static site generator,” in the tradition of “Jekyll” optimized for larger sites, rapid publication, and easy to manage configuration. Written in Python, and using the Jinja2 template engine, Cyblog makes it easy to publish blogs and other static sites efficiently with minimal overhead.
Current planned features include:
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Incremental rebuilds of sites.
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Access to advanced python tools, including python-markdown and the jinja2 template system.
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Jekyll compatible YAML-based meta data format.
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More coming soon.
The History
Shrutarshi Basu and Sam Kleinman have been avid users of the static site generator ”Jekyll,” because of its flexibility and approach to content management. Both began using Jekyll in early 2009.
We quickly discovered a major structural flaw in the Jekyll software: when Jekyll rebuilds a site, every post is regenerated every time. Even posts that haven’t changed. Every time. On small sites this is not an issue, in the slightest. With a few dozen posts Jekyll can rebuild a second or two; however, with even approximately 100 posts, a Jekyll site can take between 10 and 20 seconds to rebuild the site. A site with more than a thousand pages can take as long as two or three minutes to rebuild in practical tests.
Most of the time used by Jekyll engine is spent parsing entry text for markdown. While a great deal of the blame for these compile times can be laid at the feet of the Markdown implementations used, the truth is that no compatible markdown implementations feature both extended markdown syntax and high performance.
Enter Cyblog.
This system is designed from the bottom up to address the problems described above: to rebuild static sites quickly and efficiently, to provide advanced tools suitable for managing large and complex sites. And that’s it. Cyblog, like Jekyll attempts to adhere principals of minimalism and simplicity, by providing a feature set that’s flexible and maintainable. If you’re interested in using or contributing to cyblog, email sam@cyblog.org.