When I found out about Hugo yesterday, after comparing a list of others which must have been a few weeks too old to include the latest hotness, I almost collapsed at my keyboard. Developed in Go, distributed as a binary. Hokay. So now you can pretty much narrow your choice down to the language, then the software architecture, then the amount of activity on Github, then the license, then the corresponding "ideal website as created by SSG package X" output, then the attitudes of the authors on your favorite social networks, and finally you can probably look up the authors' girlfriends too (don't do that) and compare by girlfriend.

On top of that, the static output is dropped into gigantic pools of resources that can scale to an unimaginable degree, can probably handle hundreds of DDOSes at a time, and they probably all validate without so much as a yellow flag. Oh and if you want you can use this tool to write an API, or if you want you can just not build a site with it, because it includes a game of Nibbles which is also static in some funny way, or whatever.

It's amazing and absolutely ridiculous at the same time. In some ways it's an almost pornographic exploitation of process that cares approximately 0% about content. But it's also a huge display of generosity and demonstrates some very serious attention to craft.

In fact I wrote quite a bit about various Middleman tips and tricks on the Discover Meteor blog:

https://www.discovermeteor.com/blog/three-more-ways-to-make-...

Jekyll always felt a little bit cumbersome when you are used to all the Rails goodies like sprockets.

Since I discovered the middleman-deploy[1] gem, I also use it for my Github Pages, without any additional effort.

1) https://github.com/tvaughan/middleman-deploy (or have a look at https://github.com/neo/middleman-gh-pages as an alternative)

I suppose it really does demonstrate that rails has great mind-share and a lot of developers still using it (and enjoying using it) -- which is great. Still a little surprised there's so much apparent overlap between people that thing that "hey rails is a great way to make web-apps", and people that thing "static html is great for content". Perhaps an indication of how "ajax-driven" web development have forced everyone to look at webapps as api+rendering -- and how (apparently) well rails have been adopted to that design (because, I'm guessing, everyone's been forced to break their architecture into a view/template layer that's driven by data --- much like a well-structured coldfusion, asp or php app -- but with ajax).

Exactly the same message on DN: https://news.layervault.com/comments/62311

+1 open sourcing your static site, it's a great example of what's possible with SSGs.

[1]: https://github.com/parkr

Assuming you are using Bundler, and not trying to install the jekyll gem globally, you can manually specify a server in the Gemfile.

In an empty directory, I created a Gemfile with only these contents:

    source 'http://production.s3.rubygems.org'
    
    gem 'jekyll', '~> 2.0'

    [mason@IT-PC-MACPRO-002 jekyll-2-fuckery]$ bundle install --path vendor/bundle
    Fetching source index from http://production.s3.rubygems.org/
    Resolving dependencies.................
    Using blankslate 2.1.2.4
    <bunch of lines deleted...>
    Your bundle is complete!
    It was installed into ./vendor/bundle
    [mason@IT-PC-MACPRO-002 jekyll-2-fuckery]$ bundle exec jekyll --version
    jekyll 2.0.2
    [mason@IT-PC-MACPRO-002 jekyll-2-fuckery]$ 

(EDIT: Updated with server that worked.)

Details here. http://www.webhook.com/

Almost very moderately popular ssg has some sort of cms interface plugin.