Going static with Middleman

After running WordPress for years and years, and even doing some freelancing in the WordPress arena, I found myself far too busy within a new career as a Ruby programmer to devote the time for necessary care and feeding of WordPress.

Then I got hacked, badly.

While that’s a story (and a good one) for another day, it seemed time to transition to a static website. I don’t write that often these days, I’m not providing WordPress services or consulting, and in any case, my interest in maintaining websites is satisfied at my web application programming job.

I’ve been running the Middleman static site generator for years and really enjoy it. Middleman is under active development, uses parts of the Ruby on Rails stack with which I’m familiar, is easy to customize (being Ruby), and allows templating in a wide variety of formats, specifically markdown and haml. In short, an excellent tool for me.

The main challenges are finding a minimal code syntaxing solution which is still powerful enough for exposition (i.e., line numbers really help), and getting the MathJax library properly loading and working. MathJax is the easier parts; here’s Newton’s Second Law:

\[F = ma,\]

or, in special relativity,

\[\mathbf{F} = \frac{d\mathbf{p}}{dt}\]

So that works.

Code syntax implementation is still underway.