BenHollis.net

For the last 8 months or so, I’ve been contributing to Thomas Reynolds’ open source project Middleman. Middleman is a Ruby framework for building static websites using all the nice tools (Haml, Sass, Compass, CoffeeScript, partials, layouts, etc.) that we’re used to from the Ruby on Rails world, and then some. This website is built with Middleman, and I think it’s the best way to put together a site that doesn’t need dynamic content. Since I started working on Middleman in November 2011, I’ve been contributing to the as-yet-unreleased version 3.0, which overhauls almost every part of the framework. Today, after many betas and release candidates, Middleman 3.0 is finally released and ready for general use, and I’m really proud of what I’ve been able to help build.

I’ve been building web sites for myself since the early 90s, before I even had an internet connection at home (I could see some primitive sites on Mosaic on my father’s university network). Early on I was inspired by HyperCard and Quicktime VR and I wanted to make my own browseable worlds, but I didn’t have a Mac (nor did I know what I was doing). Starting with Notepad and early Netscape, I started building sites full of spinning animated GIFs, blinking text, and bad Star Wars fanfiction. As time went on and I learned more bout how to actually build websites, the duplication of common elements like menus, headers, and footers became too much to manage. Around the same time I discovered how to make dynamic websites backed by a database, using ASP. For my static websites, I just used ASP includes and functions to encapsulate these common elements and do a little templating. With the release of .NET, I switched to writing sites, static and dynamic, in ASP.NET. Far too long after, I realized that hosting websites on Windows was a terrible idea, and I switched to using PHP to handle light templating duty. For dynamic, database-driven sites I switched to using Ruby on Rails, and I fell in love with its powerful templating and layout system, the Ruby language, Haml, Sass, and all the rest. However, the gulf between my Rails projects and my cheesy PHP sites was huge – all my tools were missing, and I still needed PHP available to host sites even though they were essentially static.

My first attempt to reconcile the two worlds was a Ruby static site generator called Staticmatic. Staticmatic had Haml built in, and worked mostly like Rails. I had just finished moving my site over to it when the developer discontinued the project. In its place, he recommended Middleman. However, as I started transitioning my site to Middleman, I found a few bugs, and wishing to be a good open source citizen, I included new tests with my bug reports. Thomas Reynolds, the project’s creator, encouraged me to keep contributing, and even gave me commit access to the GitHub repository very early on (at which point I broke the build on my first commit). From that point I started fixing more and more bugs, and then eventually answering issue reports, and finally adding new features and helping to overhaul large parts of the project. I’d contributed to open source projects before, but just with a bugfix here and there. Middleman has been my first real contribution, with ongoing effort and a real sense of ownership in the project.

My contributions have focused mainly in three areas. First, I’ve helped to get the new Sitemap feature working. I liked the way similar frameworks like Nanoc had a way to access a view of all the pages in a site in code, to help with automatically generating navigation. Middleman’s sitemap goes beyond that, providing a way to inspect all the files in a project, (including virtual pages), and even add to the list via extensions.

The next area I worked on is the blogging extension. I like the way Jekyll handles static blogging, but I wanted my blog to be just one part of my whole site – Jekyll is a little too focused on blog-only sites. I basically rewrote the fledgling blog extension that Thomas had started, and I’m really proud of the result. It not only handles basic blogging, but also generates tag and date pages, supports next/previous article links, and is extremely customizable. I moved my blog over from Wordpress (no more security vulnerabilities, yay!) and it’s been great.

The last place I focused was on website performance. I’ve always been interested in how to build very fast websites, and I wanted Middleman to support best practices around caching and compression. To that end, I built an extension that appends content-based hashes to asset filenames so you can give them long cache expiration times, and another extension that will pre-gzip your files to take load off your web server and deliver smaller payloads.

Beyond that I’ve fixed a lot of bugs, sped things up, written a lot of documentation, and added a lot of little features. I’m really happy that 3.0 is finally out there for people to use, and I hope more people will choose to contribute. And I’m looking forward to all the new stuff we’re going to add for 3.1!