Python for static site building

published December 29, 2025

I wish my posts would stop being meta commentary about developing the site... but I think this is at least slightly better than being a glorified changelog.

I hate needless complexity.

I started my blog using Svelte / SvelteKit and found it to be easy to start with! But over time, I found it somewhat unwieldly for my use case. I don't want to rely on a JavaScript runtime like Node.js to build my site, since all I'm doing is serving JS-free text-only content.

Once I examined what my needs were, I realized that all I need is a script that glues HTML files. Header to content, content to footer. That's it.

So I wrote that. I used Python, both for its excellent package ecosystem and its (relative) portability. I could easily edit and build my site on my Android phone! I considered C since I've been writing a lot of that lately, but besides the ugly implementation I'd probably end up writing, things like Markdown parsing and code highlighting would be a massive burden for me.

Python has tons of ways to make it easy to compile simple sites like mine. I use:

• mistune for Markdown content parsing
• python-frontmatter for Markdown frontmatter parsing
• and sooon enough, pygments for code highlighting

Far from the 100~ Node modules that get imported as soon as you initialize even a more lightweight static site generator like 11ty. My site repository shrunk from 180 megabytes to 78 kilobytes!