Regenerate

Regenerate is an experimental static website generator. It's most experimental aspect is that it can be used to re-generate HTML files in-place, which may or may not be a good idea. It does however have an alternative mode of operation (which I currently use for all my websites) which is to generate from source files to separate output files, and, optionally, to regenerate source files from edited output files (where that is practical).

The basic idea of Regenerate is that an HTML (or XML) source page is both a valid HTML page and a representation of a Ruby object which defines the data which will be used to generate (or "regenerate") the output file. To make this work, there are special defined HTML comment lines which either delineate or contain Ruby-related components in the page, in particular:

• The specification of the Ruby class representing the "page object"
• Instance variables of the page object, and their values. The values of these instance variables can be either inside comments, or actual HTML content bounded by start and end comments (in which case these values can be updated, which is how the page content is regenerated).
• Blocks of Ruby code which will be executed in the context of the page object.

Regenerate is available as a Ruby gem, and its official source page is at https://github.com/pdorrell/regenerate.

Propolize

Propolize is a content-generator which uses a somewhat Markdown-like syntax to generate content for Propositional Writing (which see).

It is available as a Ruby gem, and its official source page is at https://github.com/pdorrell/propolize.

Sample Code

Currently neither the Regenerate or Propolize code bases contain test examples.

However, this very website is generate using both gems, and I have include a partial snapshot of the source code (and corresponding output files) in thinkinghard-partial-snapshot.zip.

To run the examples, do the following:

• Download the zip file into a directory
• Unzip the file, which will create a sub-directory thinkinghard-partial-snapshot
• Install the Ruby gems propolize and regenerate (I'm assuming you've installed Ruby – if you haven't, install that first.)
• From the command line, and the directory into which you downloaded the zip file, run:
• ruby -S regenerate thinkinghard-partial-snapshot/src

Executing the final command should regenerate the partial website without any errors.

A configuration option "checkNoChanges" is set to true in the .regenerate.rb script which causes it to validate that output files are regenerated without any changes. This option can be set to false (or just commented out) if you wish to experiment with making changes in the source files.

The regenerate command can also be run on source directories or individual files, e.g. thinkinghard-partial-snapshot/src/blog or thinkinghard-partial-snapshot/src/blog/BiologyOfMorality.html.

Regenerate can also be run on some output directories or files, but only on those which can be un-regenerated, which for the moment is just those files that have no special Regenerate source code, and are therefore "generated" by direct copying to the corresponding output directory.