writing
Zero: A Minimal Static HTML Engine
There are hundreds of static HTML generators out there and no doubt a lot of very good ones. But I wanted something as simple as possible, plus it was good opportunity to learn Gulp.
Many of the static engines I tried were optimized for specific uses, mainly blogging. Jekyll is perfect for that. But if you just want to build a prototype or simple site I found I was working against the technology and ignoring lots of features I didn't need.
Partially out of this frustration and my own interest in Gulp after reading Considering a Static Site Tool? Learn Gulp I put together Zero. It's as minimal as I could make it with just the features I needed. Among them:
- Pages with partials using Swig
- Sass/Compass compilation
- Preview server with BrowserSync
- Watch processes recompiles HTML and static assets
- CSS injection and auto-reload for changes to all other files
- Everything is compiled into the
_builddirectory