Nanoc VS Bridgetown

When we decided to open-source our blog and docs, we were spoilt for choices. Today there are multiple well-supported and fully-featured frameworks for open-source content creation. Some of the options that we considered were Ghost, Jekyll, Hugo, Nanoc, and Gatsby. There are even more frameworks beyond these, and each tool has its pros and cons. Which one do we recommend? Well, we don’t. The best tool for you is the one that fulfills your requirements.

My websites use a static site generator, that means I have folders of Markdown files and they get converted by this program to HTML. (I'm using nanoc for nearly a decade, but other generators work fine. I like Ruby, so that's why I never tried any of the new JS stuff.) I don't just hit publish on my whole Zettelkasten, but that would work as well if you point your static site generator to your note archive.

Last time I was evaluating static site generators, Dimples and Nanoc both stood out for this recent-updates reason, among other personal criteria.

https://github.com/waferbaby/dimples

https://nanoc.ws/

Jekyll is a simplistic framework for static websites that originally sparked the static website and JAMstack movements. While there are many similar frameworks with more features, Jekyll remains one of the simplest on the market. It has been somewhat forgotten and hasn't evolved much lately, to the point where some people decided to take matters into their own hands and fork this framework into something called Bridgetown.

I use https://www.bridgetownrb.com/ and it works pretty well. Very easy to use and deploy. Blog posts are listing line by line, like "index". I didn't customize much from the generated code(only logo and header). You can take a look: ruzig.com

I'm using bridgetown because I like sitting on the bleeding edge, its basically a newer Jekyll which I would recommend checking out too. Bridgetown has a great modern dev experience but its missing some of the ecosystem from Jekyll. Not a problem for me because I'm really comfortable with Ruby.

If you want to have a different UI or your blog to look in a very specific way I recommend using Jekyll or Bridgetown.

If I wanted to post a simple website today I would look into Jekyll. There are a ton of articles and answers to common questions etc. It itself is written in Ruby but using it will not likely help you to learn Ruby. One-step in the direction of learning Ruby and getting a simple website could be Bridgetown. This will start you down a path of learning Ruby and not Rails. We use Bridgetown for our company site at Flagrant.

In the Hotwire Turbo world specifically, several discussions about integrating transition animations also took place and a few promising approaches emerged, namely the Turn project or the transitions in Bridgetown. There is also a chapter in the Noel Rappin’s Modern Front-End book and an interesting article but overall, frankly, this topic still fells somewhat early-stage and exploratory.

https://www.bridgetownrb.com/ static site generator. Can be linked with prism of you want a kind of panel to add new articles.

FYI. I used Bridgetown as a static site generator recently and rather enjoyed it. https://github.com/bridgetownrb/bridgetown.