thelinuxlink.net

Is there any way that I can use wordpress (or any other tool) to easily generate static pages that I can then export to my webserver. Ideally, I would like to be able to use CSS and templates. The problem is that the webserver that I want to use doesn't give me any PHP or CGI support, so I want to generate static HTML pages and upload them, and yet, I don't want to have to hand code the HTML pages with the content I want to put up.

Well - yes and no.

You could just browse the page on your local server, view source, and save the HTML. But you may find that somethings don't work properly.

Do they allow anything? Blosxom uses Perl and flatfiles which might be more acceptable?

If you go to Wordpress admin --> Options --> Permalinks, you can choose between a few formats of linkin to your posts.

Actually there are a few neat tools that can be used in Linux to do just that.

nanoblogger:

Introduction
NanoBlogger is a small weblog engine written in Bash for the command line. It uses common UNIX tools such as cat, grep, and sed to create static HTML content. It's free to use and modify under the GNU General Public License.

You can find it at: http://nanoblogger.sourceforge.net/

tiddlywiki:

Welcome to TiddlyWiki, a free MicroContent WikiWikiWeb created by JeremyRuston and a busy Community of independent developers. It's written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript to run on any modern browser without needing any ServerSide logic. It allows anyone to create personal SelfContained hypertext documents that can be posted to a WebServer, sent by email or kept on a USB thumb drive to make a WikiOnAStick. It also makes a great GuerillaWiki. This is revision 2.0.8 of TiddlyWiki, and is published under an OpenSourceLicense.

You can find it at: http://www.tiddlywiki.com/

I tried setting up nanoblogger and using it, but never got too deep. I seems like the perfect tool for what you would like to do.

TiddlyWiki has become my killer app recently. I love this tool. It can be used to easily create a journal with tags and links with the whole thing being saved in just one html file. The trick is that it is completely coded in html, css, and javascript. I have copied it onto a USB stick, and create notebooks for the research or solutions that I have found at whatever computer I might be at. For example I have created a notebook for my Linux solutions, so that I remember how I fixed a problem on one of my systems. I have different ones for Slackware, Kanotix, and general computer solutions. I plan to use it as my notebook for two classes that I am taking this summer as well, so that I have all of my reseach for my papers in one place. Since it is just html, css, and javascript it should run on any computer that has an up to date web browser. You could use it for what you want to do by creating your blog content, then uploading the file as a read only file on your server space. There are examples of people doing that, in fact the home page is an example of that. There is one disadvantage. As your blog increases in size the size of your file will increase too. Since the whole page needs to download first before it will show, you would want to limit the size of the blog file. A 1 meg file on dial up before you see the page would be frustrating to readers. That could be fixed by archiving the blog files at a certain size, then simply start a new file.

I hope those options help.

Steve
mowestusa

Not having access to PHP makes it slightly more difficult. If you had PHP, you could try:

http://www.simplephpblog.com/
http://www.pivotlog.net/

I agree with Steve on nanoblogger. I've played with it a fair amount and it's pretty cool. It's neat doing everything in Bash. Someone else mentioned bloxsom -- another cool script in perl.

http://www.blosxom.com/

Thank you all for your tips. The server that I am going to use is purely static -- not even Perl is available. This is my work server, so I can understand them not allowing us dynamic content. The fact that they're giving us personal web pages on the outside is pretty cool for me. I will check out nanoblogger and blosxom and let you know how it goes.

A friend of mine also suggested doing it in XML and then using XSLT for generating HTML. I could write a small project with a makefile that would generate the HTML. That means I would still have to write my content in XML, but this going to be a lot easier and more flexible than doing it with HTML.