ChiveGen: A Static Site Generator for Fanfiction Archives

This page will be updated in the future, but hey! This exists! Or will exist. It's in development.

ChiveGen is just what the title says: a static website generator designed specifically for fanfiction archives. It runs from the command line, and turns a folder of (specially formatted) text files into a simple static HTML website.

ChiveGen is currently on version 0.2.12 (alpha). You can check out a current demo here.

The Archive Your Archive Could Smell Look Like

ChiveGen is intended to be highly customizable, with a number of command line options and lots of replacable templates, so with enough creativity you can make your archive look nearly however you like. (Technically you could even kludge it into a blog or something! But I would not recommend this.)

You Don't Even Need To Know (Much) HTML

No, really. If you know that <i></i> makes italics, <u></u> makes underline, and <b></b> makes bold, you're pretty much set! The Casual HTML option will put those pesky <p></p> tags on for you while leaving preformatted text and HTML alone, and everything else is just templates.

It's Pretty Quick!

It's no Hugo, but the Demo archive you see above was fully generated in under a second, HTML-ification included. (Current average time for it was ~900ms?)

Written in Java (Coffee Not Included)

Compile it on your own computer, if you want. Or you can get the precompiled binaries and a shell script to run them for you all nice and tidy looking.

Coming Someday to a Repository Near You

ChiveGen is intended to be free and open source when it's done, though I have not yet chosen a license (and until it's actually ready to release, that feels like putting the cart a feeew yards ahead of the horse, haha.)

Possible Future Features

Things that might be added on the roadmap.

  • AO3 support (i.e. the ability to download your fic from AO3 as HTML and use it as an input file!)
  • An actual download lol
  • Non-CLI interface? Maybe??? I think most people using a tool like this are okay with some command line stuff but we'll see, idk