The page on which you read this has been generated by Bakery. Bakery is a simple Python program to generate a simple site for me.
I write pages, posts or whatever you want to call them in plain text following the Markdown specification, like the trendy people do. Texts are both readable in themselves and also easily converted by various tools into other formats such as HTML. Bakery takes my texts, runs them through a Python implementation of Markdown, slaps on a header and footer and saves the resulting HTML as files.
That is pretty much it.
Sounds simple? It sure is!
The whole point is that the result is plain and simple HTML without any server smarts required whatsoever. I do my stuff locally and just upload the resulting files. No SSI, no PHP, no remote administration, login processes, security holes, databases or anything else.
It feels clean.
But why roll your own?
There are Many tools out there more than willing to fill this exact need. But it was a fun and quick project, I got to do something useful in Python, and I know exactly what everything does and does not.
bakery.py currently (2013-01-03) weighs in at 188 lines, more than ten percent of which are comments and blank lines.
I like Bakery, and I hope we will remain great friends for a long time.