Set up new nanoc-generated website

Posted on Friday, 2nd December 2011

I started using nanoc in order to generate a bit more interesting site. Previously, I just had a single, hand-generated page, which was fine as a list of links really, but it wasn’t useful as a showcase of my projects and I quite liked the idea of having my own blog. Whether I’ll blog more than once a year or not, is another question.

nanoc seems to be pretty good overall and I think it was a better choice for me than Jekyll, which I’d used previously (this is because Jekyll can be used to directly host at Github, which is good, but it doesn’t support HAML in that usage, which is bad). It isn’t too complicated to set up and I use HAML for layout, kramdown for content and Sass for style quite nicely.

One thing that dismays me a little with nanoc is that you have to manually manage rules for compilation and routing, when it could have much more reasonable defaults set up and a bit more assumption of standard practice.

I know it is probably not exemplary, but the generator source for this whole site is freely available at Github.