This past weekend was a very productive one for me, because I’ve started to work on and released my book’s one-page website —rapidprototypingwithjs.com. I’ve used Wintersmith to learn something new and to ship fast. Wintersmith is a Node.js static site generator. It greatly impressed me with flexibility and ease of development. In addition I could stick to my favorite tools such as Markdown, Jade and Underscore.

Why Static Site Generators

Here is a good article on why using a static site generator is a good idea in general, An Introduction to Static Site Generators. It basically boils down to a few main things:

Templates

You can use template engine such as Jade. Jade uses whitespaces to structure nested elements and its syntax is similar to Ruby on Rail’s Haml markup.

Markdown

I’ve copied markdown text from my book’s Introduction chapter and used it without any modifications. Wintersmith comes with marked parser by default. More on why Markdown is great in my old post, Markdown Goodness.

Simple Deployment

Everything is HTML, CSS and JavaScript so you just upload the files with FTP client, e.g., Transmit by Panic or Cyberduck.

Basic Hosting

Due to the fact that any static web server will work well, there is no need for Heroku or Nodejitsu PaaS solutions, or even PHP/MySQL hosting.

Performance

There are no database calls, no server-side API calls, no CPU/RAM overhead.

Flexibility

Wintersmith allows for different plugins for contents and templates and you can even write you own plugin.

Getting Started with Wintersmith

There is a quick getting started guide on github.com/jnordberg/wintersmith.

To install Wintersmith globally, run NPM with -g and sudo:

$ sudo npm install wintersmith -g

Then run to use default blog template:

$ wintersmith new <path>

or for empty site:

$ wintersmith new <path> -template basic

or use a shortcut:

$ wintersmith new <path> -T basic

Similar to Ruby on Rails scaffolding Wintersmith will generate a basic skeleton with contents and templates folders. To preview a website, run these commands:

$ cd <path>
$ wintersmith preview
$ open http://localhost:8080

Most of the changes will be updates automatically in the preview mode except for the config.json file.

Images, CSS, JavaScript and other files go into contents folder.
Wintersmith generator has the following logic:

1. looks for *.md files in contents folder,
2. reads metadata such as template name,
3. processes *.jade templates per metadate in *.md files.

When you’re done with your static site, just run:

$ wintersmith build

Other Static Site Generators

Here are some of the other Node.js static site generators:

• DocPad
• Blacksmith
• Scotch
• Wheat
• Petrify

More detailed overview of these static site generators is available in the post, Node Based Static Site Generators.

For other languages and frameworks like Rails and PHP take a look at Static Site Generators by GitHub Watcher Count and the “mother of all site generator lists”.