Productivity Sauce

Dmitri Popov

What do instant coffee and Poole have in common? Both can be used to get a result in seconds. Put a teaspoon or two of instant coffee in a cup, add hot water, stir, and enjoy. Generating a website with Pool is almost as fast and easy. But before you put Poole to some practical use, make sure that Python 2.5 or higher and the python-markdown package are installed on your machine. Pull Pool from the project's Mercurial repository:

hg clone http://bitbucket.org/obensonne/poole/ ~/poole

Open the ~/.bashrc file in a text editor and add the following line to it:

export PATH=$PATH:~/poole

Create a directory for your website and switch to it:

mkdir ~/poolsite cd ~/poolsite

Use the commands below to initialize the directory, generate a sample website, and launch Poole's built-in server:

poole.py --init poole.py --build poole.py --serve

You can then see the freshly-baked website in all its glory by pointing your browser to http://127.0.0.1:8080/.

To add a new page to the sample website, create a Markdown text file in the ~/poolsite/input directory. If you want to include the page into the website's navigation menu, add the following header at the top of the text file (replace Page title with the actual name and specify the desired position in the menu by modifying the menu-position value).

title: Page title menu-position: 0 ---

Save the file with the md extension, and run the poole.py --build command to rebuild the website. Despite its simplicity, Poole is a rather flexible tool. For example, it uses a simple HTML template to generate pages, so you can easily control the final result by tweaking the template and the poole.css file in the input directory. For more tips and tricks on using Poole, visit the project's website.

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