About AsciiDoc Website Builder
AsciiDoc Website Builder (awb) is a python program that allows you to write a website in almost plain text (ie AsciiDoc), plus a few simple configuration files.
The awb story
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. Later I wanted a consistent look and tried out shtml for templating. Cool, but I needed more power, so I moved over to php.
After a while the php thing wore 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.
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 Iraq war (AWB Wheat for Weapons Scandal as it was known in Australia).
awb logo
The logo was sourced from clker.com and is in the public domain.