In setting up this blog, I wanted to have a go at the new crop of static site generators. Having used tools like Plone and Drupal before, I wanted to see if I could really get by with something nice and light.

I came across Jekyll, Octopress, etc. But I was interested in something that was based on Python and Jinja2 because I was in a bit of a hurry to get started and I had been doing some prototyping with this toolchain recently. That's when I came across Wok. Wok is a static site generators that can also be used to do the usual blog related organizational tasks.

Unfortunately, things were not so smooth in the beginning. In particular, I couldn't seem to find any documentation on getting started (well, there was this link, but it lead to a 404 page). There was, however, a bunch of documentation on directory structure, templating, configuration and content. But the problem was, all the information didn't mean very much if you didn't actually know how Wok worked.

So it turns out that I was a little too quick to skim the documentation. It turned out the key piece of information was contained in the documentation on categories. I assumed that this documentation explained how blog posts could be associated with different categories, but this was completely wrong (that would be called tagging in Wok).

It turns out that categories are the essential property that is used to build up the "tree" structure of the site. I'm far from an expert (just getting started really), but Wok seems quite straightforward once you gain this one piece of information about its function. The fact that it uses Jinja2 makes it quite easy for me to build up a nice site completely from scratch.