I recently released 0.3.0 of my static site generator project Lifer, which I intend to use to build this website in the (near) future. Right now, I build this website using Jekyll, the “simple, blog-aware” static site generator.

Lifer and Jekyll have some things in common. For example, they’re both written in Ruby, and they both output HTML documents and RSS feeds to an output directory. They both read frontmatter metadata from Markdown files to help you maintain collections of pages and blog posts that belong to a small- or medium-sized website.

Jekyll has done me no wrong, but there are things about Jekyll I have found opinionated or hard to work around: Jekyll requires you to use Liquid templates for generating posts and pages; _posts is a bit too magic a collection of articles; its built-in asset pipeline is not very flexible.

It seemed like a good opportunity for me to try designing my own site generator, to see how simple I could make something I could use for myself, and to learn first-hand where all of the hidden complexity lies.

Now, 150-ish commits in, the shape of the site generator I want is coming together. I started this project, casually, over two years ago. So, at this rate, it’ll be a long time before anyone else can actually use Lifer. Testing the generator in production, though, will be quite a milestone. Stay tuned.