I second the thumbs-up to Middleman...to me, it hits the right sweet spot between hack-it-yourself-static-site and building out a Sinatra/Padrino/Rails, or even a WordPress site.
Having Sass and templating work right out of the box is, for many of my projects, just about all I need. Then I add a plugin to deploy to S3 and I'm good to go. But one of Middleman's best features is the ability to supply JSON (or YAML) files and automatically generate routes and pages from the data. I find it to be a nice way to prototype data-heavy sites that may end up requiring a full-blown Rails setup.
If all you're doing is blogging, then Jekyll might be all you need (especially since it, I think, had native Sass support in its latest version)...but for anything more complicated, or even simpler (i.e. a few static pages and not a blog), Middleman hits that niche very sweetly. I came across it when reading an article by a front-end shop about how they use it as a sort-of backend to their client-side-heavy apps...I haven't used it for that purpose yet, but, given how easy it is to setup the build process via Sprockets, I have no doubt it could serve as a decent static backbone for such an app.
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I second the thumbs-up to Middleman...to me, it hits the right sweet spot between hack-it-yourself-static-site and building out a Sinatra/Padrino/Rails, or even a WordPress site.
Having Sass and templating work right out of the box is, for many of my projects, just about all I need. Then I add a plugin to deploy to S3 and I'm good to go. But one of Middleman's best features is the ability to supply JSON (or YAML) files and automatically generate routes and pages from the data. I find it to be a nice way to prototype data-heavy sites that may end up requiring a full-blown Rails setup.
If all you're doing is blogging, then Jekyll might be all you need (especially since it, I think, had native Sass support in its latest version)...but for anything more complicated, or even simpler (i.e. a few static pages and not a blog), Middleman hits that niche very sweetly. I came across it when reading an article by a front-end shop about how they use it as a sort-of backend to their client-side-heavy apps...I haven't used it for that purpose yet, but, given how easy it is to setup the build process via Sprockets, I have no doubt it could serve as a decent static backbone for such an app.
Vox Media uses Middleman for most of their features: http://product.voxmedia.com/2014/7/29/5863004/take-a-peek-at...