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,
>  -Chris
> 
> 
Article from Martin Fowler about using rake (ruby's version of 
make/ant/etc) to generate his static website

http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/rake.html