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Comment by LeafStorm | Hacker News Reader

I have never used Jekyll. I do, however, frequently use nanoc[1] - it takes a bit more effort to set up, but it is far more flexible, because instead of ridiculous configuration files, you are actually writing Ruby code (in a very nice DSL, might I add) that controls how each set of files is compiled.

One thing I did with it was create a Web site with recipes on it. The recipe files didn't have any actual content, everything was stored in the metadata. I had the Rules file set up so that they would run the Recipes through a layout that would expand them to HTML (consistently), then that was run through the normal page template.

It also used a preprocess rule to generate fresh items "on the fly" that serve as indices for each recipe type. Again, no content - the Rules file is set up so that the artificial items get all their content from a layout before being actually layouted with the site template.

[1]: http://nanoc.stoneship.org/

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And even more simple and powerful than nanoc:

http://stasis.me

Huh?

I think Stasis is great in theory, but a few things are preventing me from using it full time. Namely that I can't pass simple options to a template engine (of which I do a lot).

It appears that you're the author. Can you offer any information on how Stasis is, in some ways, better than nanoc?

You are right. I would appreciate a fork to fix this very minor issue, but if not I will be getting to it very soon.

It can do everything nanoc does, but the execution is much simpler and much more natural. This is not just my opinion, but what I have heard from lots of people.

My apologies for the self-promotion, just trying to get the word out.

Except that Stasis has no support for on-the-fly creation of items from your Ruby code, no distinction between filters for content and for layouts, no support for non-filesystem data sources, no dependency tracking, and no metadata per item, among other things.

It may be more simple, but it is nowhere near as powerful.

You can do all of this via controllers. You can execute any Ruby code you want before each template renders.

There is distinction between filters for content and layouts, simply use the layout filename in a before block.

You can execute any Ruby you want. You can use ActiveRecord, Redis, whatever. Load YAML for metadata. None of this stuff needs to be baked in, Ruby already does it.

Different, but also interesting:

http://get-serve.com/

"Serve provides the equivalent of the Views part of the Rails MVC. Edit and tweak your websites on-the-fly with the Serve server. And when you are ready to deploy, you have two options. Either export to a pure HTML static site or deploy the source on any Ruby-friendly web host."

One of many interesting ways to design/build a static site. You could then basically use Jekyll as a deploy tool to GitHub pages.

As a designer, I can attest the difficulty of developing using Jekyll, b/c to see your work you need to switch on the Jekyll server, and no changes will compile until you flip the switch again. I know Octopress fixes that, but I'm still wrestling with how to ditch the included theme and build my own.

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