clarkdave.net

Building a static blog with nanoc

Having a static site may feel a bit like a throwback, but the benefits are well noted and there are various frameworks around to turn your text and templates into HTML. For my site, I opted for nanoc, which is Ruby based and extremely flexible.

nanoc is simple to set up and use, but because it’s so generic it doesn’t (by default) do the things you might expect from a blog, like tags, archives, timestamps and the like. For something a bit more ‘out the box’, I’d suggest looking at Jekyll, or Octopress (which is even more feature-packed).

I wanted to use nanoc as it doesn’t restrict your choice of template/rendering engine, and because it’s lightweight and gets out of the way, making it easy to hammer into shape. In this post I’ll explain how to flex nanoc into a simple blogging platform.

Scraping your data from First Direct

Like most people, I’m a routine user of internet banking. Although my bank, First Direct, do have an banking web application, I want to get at my financial data on my own terms so I can use it for more interesting projects. Since First Direct don’t offer any sort of API I decided to use NodeJS and Zombie (a headless web browser) to do the job instead.

So, if you’re a First Direct customer and a programmer, and want to get your data out too, follow along! If you’re a member of a different bank, you might still find this helpful as the advice should be fairly generic (although, if your banking website is very Javascript-heavy, it’ll be harder).