Nanoc is a static-site-generator that I wrote and maintain. It started in 2007 and is still going strong. I initially wrote it to use for my personal web site (the one you’re reading right now) and I still use it for that.

I write a lot in Bear, and the import what I wrote into my Nanoc site. See Importing notes from Bear for how I do that.

I do have a few thoughts around strengths and weaknesses of Nanoc. If I were to start over with Nanoc, or create an entirely new SSG from scratch, those are the things I would pay particular attention to:

• Nanoc needs --json so that the CLI can be used programmatically
• Nanoc needs file paths to be known before compilation starts
• Nanoc sites take too long to load
• Nanoc’s in-memory approach limits scalability
• Nanoc’s lack of parallelism slows down compilation
• Nanoc’s live recompilation is inefficient
• Nanoc’s preprocessor hinders optimization
• Nanoc’s terminology is inconsistent with the industry
• Nanoc’s use of Ruby is not an appealing choice these days
• Checking and deployment does not belong in Nanoc
• Too easy in Nanoc to get undefined behavior
• It is hard in Nanoc to use reusable view components