On Oct 31, 2006, at 4:08 AM, Chris Pearl wrote:

>  Are there Ruby tools to help webmasters manage static websites?

ZenWeb http://rubyforge.org/projects/zenweb

clean, simple, powerful.

Supports all of the requirements you listed (nav, header, footer) via  
a simple pipelined renderer mechanism. I use it for my 259 page  
static website. I mainly like it because it allows me to focus on  
content and let it deal with the rest. I just write in plain text for  
95% of the site and it just works.