Bring your own static site generator

Configuration.
Who wants it?
Not me!

Eleventy is great.
Jekyll is great.
All the static-site-generators are great.

I don’t want to configure them.
I don’t want to maintain the configuration of them.
I don’t want to upgrade them over time.

I do want to control my own little system from end-to-end.

Call it procrastination.
Call it having fun.
At the end of the day, I know my sensibilities.
I don’t want dependencies.
I want a feature-light, do-it-yourself website.

So that’s what I’m building.

My static site generator is a Rakefile.
It mostly invokes pandoc to transform Markdown into HTML.
RSS::Maker.make builds the RSS feed.
One special task generates the index page.
A little bit of Ruby glues it all together.

No Gemfile.
No package.json.
There’s two dependencies.
The Ruby standard library and pandoc.
I’m optimistic that I can replace pandoc with RDoc::Markdown and ERB templates.
Maybe—someday—if the pandoc dependency proves too heavy.

It’s not much.
I like it.
And I’ll sleep easy knowing that I’ll never have to run bundle update or npm update again.