Comment by zahlman

>Also I didn't want all the theme-ing overhead that comes with those - just something I could inject into my existing site.

I didn't like how complex that stuff is with Nikola - I didn't have an obvious entry point for making the kinds of customizations I really wanted, and yet there was still so much to look at in order to understand the system. But at the same time I really didn't want to spend hours re-learning CSS more or less from scratch, when I could actually use the examples already in the existing themes.

I did something really awful: instead of trying to make yet another layer of theme "extension", I copied everything locally and have been condensing it as I go.

This had the benefit that I didn't have to decide on a bunch of CSS classes up front in order to have anything look passable. There may be tons of unused stuff, but I'm cleaning that up as I implement my own things - and bit by bit, I get something smaller and more comprehensible that fits my mental models. This conversion process might not be any faster, but I'm certainly enjoying myself more.

At some point in the future I'm considering doing a simple templating engine and converting these templates (originally Mako) to it. It just irritates me that I still have to deal with close tags - both in HTML and in template directives - when I'm doing everything in Python. I have a vague memory of a 2010-era JavaScript templating system - I think it was called Express or something like that? - which used indent-based syntax without closing tags. So I'm inspired by my recollection of that.