On Tue, 31 Oct 2006, Chris Pearl wrote:

>  Are there Ruby tools to help webmasters manage static websites?
> 
>  I'm talking about regenerating an entire static website - all the HTML
>  files in their appropriate directories and sub-directories. Each page
>  has some fixed parts (navigation menu, header, footer) and some
>  changing parts (body content, though in specific cases the normally
>  fixed parts might change as well). The tool should help to keep site
>  editing DRY every piece of data, including the recurring parts, should
>  exist only once.
> 
>  The above should be doable with any decent templating tool, such as
>  those forming part of most CMSes and full-stack web-frameworks.
>  Normally I might have just resorted to a CMS/web-framework, running
>  locally on the webmaster's station, with the only addition being a
>  mechanism for generating all pages composing the site and saving them
>  as files.
> 
>  But such a solution might not be enough, as the system I'm looking for
>  must be able to control the physical traits of the website as a
>  collection of files - e.g., creation and distribution of files among
>  several physical directories and subdirectories.
> 
>  Any advice would be appreciated,

i'm not quite clear why you wouldn't just setup a rails site and crawl it to
generate the static site?  since speed wouldn't be an issue on the rails end
you could just use webrick and an sqlite db to keep things simple and
dependancy free.  this gives you a huge toolset to work from and a mailing
list to ask questions on - the only custom work you'd need to do is write a
dedicated crawler script, and even that might turn out to be nothing but a
single wget command if you planned your site carefully.

cheers.

-a
-- 
my religion is very simple.  my religion is kindness. -- the dalai lama