Cactus Volt

After Punching  Jekyll and Hyde, it was time to look at alternative static blog generator. Something that I came across in the process is Cactus. It looks rather promising, unfortunately as with many open source projects the documentation is somewhat scarce. Still for all this is python which means I can dig through the code, or so I thought until I ran across this curious error in markdown:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 772: ordinal not in range(128). -- Note: Markdown only accepts unicode input!

I know there is nothing wrong with the markdown because the same file was processed without any glitches by Jekyll. Al that the offending line in the markdown plugin does is:

html = md.convert(f.read())

Seriously? Next up I tried volt and predictably encountered another issue with the markdown. This time the complaint is that the time attribute is missing from the front matter. The input in both cases is the same set of files from the wordpress export. The export was created with the wordpress to jekyll exporter .   Update feb 17: I returned to Volt on feb 17, tried to process the markdown files produced by exitwp, volt still chokes on it.