After the Dev Fu! site was launched, one of the first responses the site received from Twitter was from fellow Phoenix Rubyist James Britt.
James makes some really interesting and valid points.
We chose Wordpress for Dev Fu because there are bagillions of free Wordpress templates available online and we wanted to use one to get the site up and running quickly.
That said, I’m not personally a big fan of WordPress. Atleast not for my personal sites.
As James pointed out, there are a number of Ruby-based tools for making static websites:
Up until yesterday, remi.org was running on Jekyll and I’ve used StaticMatic for client sites before.
My problem with these tools is that they all require you to learn their framework. They all have their own ways for how you’re supposed to organize your views and static assets. Some use different templating languages. Some have special ways to manage navigation. And more.
I love the idea of generating static HTML sites in Ruby, but I like to code my sites myself. I have my own preferences and ways I want to keep things laid out. Some of these tools are overkill for what I want. Others have to be hacked to get them to work the way I want them to.
So … I made Staticify.
Staticify isn’t a framework. It does nothing more than staticly cache URLs for you from any Ruby web framework, eg. Rails or Sinatra.
http://github.com/remi/staticify