William Furney

• Background

< >

Background

This site was originally built with Jekyll, a Ruby-based static site generator. It worked fine for a while, but over time the friction of maintaining a Ruby environment just to build a small personal site started to feel like overkill.

The new build system is a single Python script — build.py — with three dependencies:

• pyyaml — frontmatter parsing
• markdown — Markdown to HTML conversion
• pygments — syntax highlighting

Running python3 build.py produces the same _site/ output that Jekyll used to generate. No Ruby, no Gemfile, no gem version headaches.

The script replicates the subset of Jekyll actually used by this site:

• Layouts and includes — the existing Liquid {% include %} tags and {{ content }} placeholders are handled with a small regex-based processor. No full Liquid implementation needed.
• Markdown conversion — Python-Markdown with the toc, fenced_code, tables, footnotes, codehilite, and md_in_html extensions covers everything the articles use.
• Redirects — redirect_from frontmatter generates meta-refresh stub pages, replicating the jekyll-redirect-from plugin.