Introducing JBake

Last year I came across a number of posts (Development Seed, Tim Bray, Tom Preston-Werner and Tao of Mac) all talking about building static sites from just text files, otherwise known as Baking, and while the technique isn't new it interested me and got me thinking about this site. The idea of working on my posts offline in any editor I fancied using and storing them in a VCS such as SVN or Git really appealed to the developer in me.

Around the same time I was finding Wordpress (and Apache) would crawl every now and then as this site is running off a relatively small VM provided by Bytemark and I thought it was time for a change.

So after a phase of defining my requirements for such a tool, I set out to build my own. The result of those few nights hacking away has been powering this site since last July and is simply called JBake, thanks to my wife.

The source code is now available on GitHub and is released under a MIT License. Something I've been meaning to do for a while.

UPDATE: Details on how I use JBake.