Second Drawer is now built with Nanoc

UPDATE: The source for seconddrawer.com.au is now available from my git server, http://git.seconddrawer.com.au/

After a long while of building this (and other) sites with Jekyll I eventually got too fed up with its limitations and have moved to Nanoc.

Both Nanoc and Jekyll are static web site builders. You build the site locally and then push the resulting site up to your server. This means the webserver is only ever serving static files.

Jekyll’s downfall

One of Jekyll’s features is that it is used by the code hosting site Github. Github can build your pages if they are laid out as a Jekyll site and it does it for you on the server. For this to work, Jekyll cannot trust any of the content passed to it. This results in the following annoying issues:

• you need to use the Liquid template engine which I found to be very limited
• other HTML builder languages such as HAML are second class citizens
• you are hamstrung by not being able to use Ruby code to build your site the way you want.

While Nanoc on the other hand has the following features that I like:

• almost any templating engine can be used via filters
• you can embed Ruby in your pages to generate almost anything at compile time
• your site structure can be customised completely (using Ruby)

The Nanoc site has some good tutorials and docs to get you started but you will learn the most by examining some example sites such as the authors own site Stoneship. One day I will stick mine up…