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I loved middleman back in the day! Great to see the project is still finding use.

While it definitely works without Ruby knowledge, I found it rather un-fun to maintain a Ruby environment. And I felt a bit locked out of customizing it.

For those with some JS familiarity who want a static but highly customizable site, I recommend 11ty or Astro.build as a modern-day Middleman alternatives. They are written in javascript top to bottom, but importantly do not presume you are interested in shipping a ton of heavy javascript to the client the way Nextjs does.

Hugo, based on Go, is really fast and reasonably customizable. I could just never wrap my head around the syntax of go templates.

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A friend used to create marketing templates and test websites in Middlemen quickly, so I ended up tinkering with it. I don't overthink, and I'm OK with the Ruby-powered engines. Well, I still run my website on Jekyll.

11ty is a good one. I was also comfortable with Nunjucks, so it worked without too much thought, and I liked it.

I tried Astro, and I'm thinking of looking at it a bit deeper. Right now, my intention is to find a pattern for my personal use where I can totally decouple the content from the tool. So, if I want to try Astro on my website, I can just do the template and let it chew up the content and spit out the website.

I highly recommend Bridgetown (https://bridgetownrb.com/) as a contemporary, actively developed alternative to middleman.

are those JS alternatives as easy as MM? I loved MM for how straightforward it felt, I didnt' have to load a ton of info in my head before being productive

I still love being in a ruby environment more than a JS one mostly because it all feels so straightforward. Somehow, this is an ethos/style baked into Ruby, whereas javascript is too spastic to be straightforward.

Bridgetown looks very cool.

For a JS environment, Astro is likely the sweet spot for you. I liked the few days I did some R&D on it. My team uses vite with static site generation, templates in vue bc the rest of the apps we build are in vue. Astro doesn't give us anything more that we need besides a content framework, but so much of our content has to be ported from old html and sprinkled with some functionality from time to time… its easier to make everything components.

It's comfortable enough too, but it took a while to make it so.

> I still love being in a ruby environment more than a JS one mostly because it all feels so straightforward. Somehow, this is an ethos/style baked into Ruby, whereas javascript is too spastic to be straightforward.

A blog engine is basically just splatting strings together, and Ruby is the nicest language for splatting strings together by far.