While browsing through the Synaptic package manager on Ubuntu, I spotted a web building application called webgen, which is a static website generator. When I first started looking into building websites, I assumed that such a package would be standard, but only now have I found something that seems to be what I have been looking for. I use Google’s Blogger for created websites / blogs, but I always feel slightly limited by the fact that my files are generate on Google’s servers, and uploaded to my own. This generally means that it takes longer to generate files than it should, but more importantly, I lose control of the process. If Google takes its servers down for maintainence, I cannot post my blogs, or edit and upload pages. I always thought that Google should offer a downloadable Blogger application so that users can generate their blogs on their own computers. I would have thought that this would save a lot of resources for Google, but as yet they appear not to be going down this route. Webgen is simply described as:
“Webgen is used to generate web pages from page description and template files.
You create one template file in which you define the layout of your page and
where the content should go. After that you can create page description files
in which you only define the content.”
Sounds ideal. I use templates, so this should, with any luck, provide a better way for me to create webpages.
Anyhow, I decided to give webgen a go, but have had a few problems. All which seem to be solvable, even by me. On first attempt at installing it, I received several errors, due to dependencies not being present. These dependencies are:
cmdparse version 2.0.0 or higher – which I think I have…
RedCloth – version 2.0.10 or higher for Textile support (needed for examples and included website templates)
Anyway, I tried to reinstall webgen using the command gem install webgen, but this just highlighted a lack of “gem”. So I followed the instructions on the terminal, and typed “sudo apt-get install rubygems” which set up rubygems version 0.9.0-5. SO, yet another new thing installed on my Linux box, which currently I do not know much about. And I still have not installed webgen.
Next step appears to be “sudo gem install redcloth” which gave the message “Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org” and hung for a while, but then continued to inform me that it had successfully installed RedCloth-3.0.4. However, this did not help.
I decided to go back to the Synaptic Package Manager, and looked up Webgen. On it was the option to install libredcloth-ruby and librmagick-ruby which lead to 4 packages being installed.
But I have more problems. On trying to run webgen, I get this message:
“Markdown not available as content format as BlueCloth could not be loaded: no such file to load — bluecloth: ” The next logical step then was to “sudo gem install bluecloth” which gave the reply “Successfully installed BlueCloth-1.0.0″. Can I run Webgen now? No. More problems, and solutions currently unkwown.
Ah, it appears that maybe cmdparse was missing too. So a quick “sudo gem install cmdparse” gave:
“Successfully installed cmdparse-2.0.2
Installing ri documentation for cmdparse-2.0.2…
Installing RDoc documentation for cmdparse-2.0.2…”
I am not sure whether it was there already though, I have a feeling it was already there.
