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The are simply too damned many static site generators out there. Too many.

I solved this problem in the obvious way: I wrote a new static site generator.

To answer the obvious question: not public yet. I’ll share when it’s ready to share, but honestly, you probably don’t want it: it’s •exactly• what I need (or on its way to being that), so it almost certainly won’t be what you need.

The thing is currently 261 lines of Ruby, and I already like it better than every alternative I’ve tried.

Still missing a few key features (the big one is components / partials that have some way to bundle up their associated CSS + JS), so who knows, it might be 1000 lines of code in a few days here.

Or I might actually try to make it fast, which will increase the size by ~100x and have me rewriting it in Swift or something.

OK, I need a name for this thing.

Its essential features that might be relevant for naming are:

- Intentionally simple
- Data / presentation separation
- I am unreasonable for having written it at all, there are way too many SSGs out there already, just use an existing tool, Paul, what are you doing, do you have no sense at all

Ridiculous suggestions welcome.

“Superfluous” it is! Thanks, @tehstu and @CptSuperlative, and to everyone who gave suggestions.

Working on it over holiday break, gradually rebuilding my personal site with it as I build up Superfluous itself. It’s…actually really good for my needs?! I still feel sheepish about building an SSG from scratch, which is clearly unnecessary, but it’s fun — and I’m a firm believer that fun is reason enough!

OK, tossing a software terminology question out to the Fedi. Context:

- Static site generator
- Top-level separation between (1) data and (2) how data gets formatted / processed
- (1) and (2) have user-visible names, are separate dirs in project root
- (1) is basically a plain text DB (md, json, yaml, etc)
- (2) may include: templates, scripting, partials, style, images, other static assets

I’m calling (1) “data”. ••What should I call (2)?••

Many options! I’m looking for your gut reaction.

@jacquiharper

@inthehands In DITA, I believe the formatting portion is called a ‘transformation’ — may be analogous is I understand correctly

@jacquiharper Hmm, yeah, that’s certainly what it does. Also includes images, static site text…but is that a transformation? Kind of