I started using static site generators some time last year, beginning with probably the most well known: Jekyll, which powers GitHub Pages. I found it ideal for creating simple sites with no need for interactivity that can be deployed anywhere (due to being pure html/css/js) while still allowing me control over the build process and asset optimisation.

Jekyll’s focus is on being minimal, lean and slightly opinionated and I was getting tired of having to implement functionality I wanted as plugins. If only there was some tool that concerned itself with front-end best practices like concatenation and minification of CSS and JavaScript and offered tooling like LiveReload as standard…

Enter Middleman

Middleman is a full-fat static site generator that cares about optimisation and developer joy out of the box (or via offical extensions). A quick list of things that I had to implement in Jekyll that are easy in Middleman:

• Sass and Compass support is standard thanks to the Sprockets asset pipeline.
• JavaScript concatentation and minification is also handled by Sprockets.
• HTML minification is handled by middleman-minify-html.
• Deployment to GitHub Pages (or ftp/rsync) is handled by middleman-deploy.
• Live reload is handled by middleman-livereload.

Naturally this site is built using Middleman and published onto GitHub Pages, and the source to generate it is available on my GitHub account.