And even more simple and powerful than nanoc:
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?
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.
"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.
It may be more simple, but it is nowhere near as powerful.
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.