After a very long hiatus, the 3 picks series is back. It’s been a busy year, with lots of changes. I’ll write more about it in the weeks to come. In the meantime, I wanted to close out the current year with a few tools I’ve been using quite a bit of recent.

The Middleman

If you’ve been to this site before, you may notice that things look a little different. After seeing a demonstration of the Middleman static site generator a few months back at KC Ruby, I decided to convert my Jekyll-based blog(s) over to an alternative framework. I’ve been working on it off and on since November, and put the finishing touches on this morning. I’m really liking it so far. It’s got support for several things I had to hack into Jekyll, and I’ve been impressed with the community offerings as well. Not to knock Jekyll—it’s been great—but in my opinion the Middleman is currently the best of the bunch when it comes to Ruby-based static site generators.

Rubular

During the conversion process, I wanted to make a few wholesale changes to my posts’ metadata. I also needed to inject a date for each post (Jekyll pulled it from the filename). The Rubular regular expression editor for Ruby helped a great deal with finding the matches I wanted.

Thor

To automate things, I decided to revisit the Thor scripting framework as an alternative to Rake. It’s got some nice features, and I’m sure I only scratched the surface with what I used.