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.

This is a backdated post from way back in the day

Based on a suggestion in b3ta newsletter #419 I have created Tubewhack; a tool that lets you find words whose letters appear in a single tube station name. For instance: Pimlico is the only Underground station which does not contain any of the letters in the word “badger”.

Credit for the name goes to @djmarland as Tubewhack is considerably more succinct than “Words Not Contained In Tube Names”.

This is a backdated post from way back in the day

Based on a suggestion in b3ta newsletter #390 I have created Kittenify; a little bookmarklet that replaces all images on the current page with pictures of kittens pulled from Flickr.

One Week Later: WOO and YAY I've made it into b3ta newsletter #391 twice. Once for the bookmarklet itself, and again for getting b3ta a bit of media coverage as Kittenfy appeared in both the online and print editions of the Metro newspaper.