AWB – Asciidoc Website Builder – is Go!

Once upon a time I wrote all my web pages directly in HTML using a text editor. MS Word sucked, and I dabbled with DreamWeaver for a while, but never for anything important (personal). But then I wanted a consistent look and tried out shtml. Cool, but I needed more power, so I moved over to php.

But the whole php thing has been wearing a bit thin. I never updated anything because I had to add info in three or five places to get it to build, and of course finding a host was a lot more difficult because they had to support php. With plain html even geocities would do in a pinch.

I was also getting fed up with writing html. I mean, it’s pretty easy, but there’s so much markup that you need to add, and then it’s not very readable. I started looking for an alternative, and decided on asciidoc. But asciidoc is designed for single documents, or even books, but not websites, and definitely not templating.

So I made my own solution. It uses asciidoc for markup – not that asciidoc has a lot of markup – and implements templating, automatic generation of blog features, sitemap.xml generation, and other goodies. The end product is good – seriously good – and I haven’t even made a release yet. It’ll be on Sourceforge soon.

I was casting about for a name for a while, and almost settled on Asciidoc Site Builder (ASB) before realising that AWB would be cooler, with a built-in joke. AWB is also the Australian Wheat Board, who paid $300m in kickbacks to Saddam Hussein before the war.

Anyhow, you should give AWB a go. It’s good stuff, even if I do say so myself.

Posted Wednesday, December 5, 2007

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