A new Ruby-based static-site generator from Shinobi creator Bradley Taunt

I wasn’t expecting a new static-site generator from Bradley Taunt, who created Shinobi, but I should have expected it because he has written a lot of short blog-generating scripts, as he details in Blogging for 7 years

He left Shinobi behind a few years ago. I don’t begrudge him that — it remains good to use and will continue to be so. Shibobi has issues for sure — the biggest being that it doesn’t support inline links or other HTML because it uses XML for web display.

He wrote PHPetite before Shinobi, and pblog and barf after that.

And now we have wruby.

I’m interested. It’s Ruby, something I already use, and which theoretically makes it more portable than a shell script. It can be harder to write a simple program in Ruby than in the Linux shell, but that portability — it can run in Windows — is something.

On the subject of portability, even though Bradley is a user of OpenBSD, I had to figure out how to modify Shinobi in order to work in a BSD environment. My changes will allow the Shinobi script to work in OpenBSD, which I tested, and FreeBSD, which I did not. The original script should work fine in NetBSD because the date utility in that system works more like it does in Linux.

My interest in Bradley’s programs remains high because I’m a big fan of blogging, especially with static sites and minimal, understandable software that can be hacked by mortals. That drew me to Shinobi.

It’s time for me to try this new site generator.

The rest of Bradley’s blog about wruby lives here. His main blog is also using this script.

Take a look at the wruby repo, which like all of Bradley’s projects is on Sourcehut.

I have already brought the repo down to my laptop and have started an experimental wruby blog.