Recently, I've seen a number of nice-looking blogging platforms pop up. Each basically let's you write your content in Markdown, shows you a live preview, and can keep posts unpublished until you're ready to bestow them upon the world. They all look nifty, but I'll never use them.

Why? I've been using blug, my Python-based static blog generator, to generate this site for years. blug was designed with a certain workflow in mind (mine) and has grown since then. I have a private fork of the public blug repo where I have all my settings and special templates. That repo is the one that sees the most love (and I'm long overdue for a sync between the private code and the public). But more importantly than blug being tuned for how I work, blug gives me something other blogging platforms don't: control.

If I were to try and replace blug, I'd basically have two options: static site generators and blogging platforms. The former are attractive because I have more control over the infrastructure of the blog. The latter are attractive because they offer a turn-key solution to something I've had to write my own tool for. Ultimately, neither solution is palatable.

I know of static site generators like Jekyll, Octopress, and Pelican. In fact this blog used to be generated via Octopress until I grew tired of my blog looking identical to every other tech blog out there. Octopress felt bloated, had no real community, and development ground to a halt. Jekyll felt too heavyweight, as it's built to accommodate any kind of site (and I'm just building a blog). Pelican didn't offer anything compelling and had minimal theming support.

Online blogging platforms lack two key features: offline editing and analytics integration. If I am drawn to a platform because it has a nice workflow, but that workflow only works with an Internet connection, it's a non-starter. Analytics, I've found, are hugely important to budding blogs, especially if said blog sells something like mine does. Not being able to change the HTML on a whim after signing up for a service like Optimizely was too restrictive.

Especially when I decided to focus on embedding microdata in my site (look at the source, it's there!), it became clear that what I really wanted was control. And blug gives me that control. It generates a site containing the features that are important to me: microdata, archives, little JavaScript, an atom.xml, and that's about it. My blog "builds" in about a second and updating after a new post is a one-command affair.

Most importantly, I am able to change the HTML whenever I want. Static site generators allow this, for the most part, but you have to strip a lot away to get at the core functionality. When you do that, you're left with something like blug.

blug is written in Python and aimed at Python 3. I knew I wanted my generator to be Python 3-based, if only because so little else was at the time. It has a very straightforward interface: you can create a new post, generate the site, or serve it locally. That's it.

When creating a new post, it slugifies the title with nice looking URLs, adds the Markdown front matter that contain things like the title, date, and categories, and puts it in the directory it uses as a source for posts when generation occurs. In my setup, this is just a symlink to the content directory of my blog repo. That means after creating a new post, I open it, write what I want, commit and push to GitHub, and that's about it. "Deployment" involves deleting my existing blog directory, generating the site fresh, and copying the results back in place.

It may seem quaint or pedestrian, but that's really it. While I'm glad I created blug, I wouldn't really recommend it to others. Why? Static site generators are so easy to write you can do so in an evening, so why not roll your own? You'll end up with a tool that supports your workflow and retain full control over how your site is structured. Also, static blogs can be used as an awesome introduction to self-hosting.

Generating my blog with blug has been a journey, and I've been forced to learn a lot on the way. I'm glad I did, however, because now I always have the site I want. And whenever "the site I want" changes, blug is happy to oblige.