✚ Switzerland

• home to the Swiss Alps
• a great place to stash some cash
• eponymous graphic design: grids and Helvetica!
• the frickin’ birthplace of the world wide web
• famously ~ neutral ~

It’s also a static content generator written in Ruby. It’s like Jekyll and Middleman in that it offers:

• Git-friendly file & folder-based content management
• Markdown formatting via Kramdown
• Fenced code blocks with optional syntax highlighting
• YAML front matter

Missing is anything involving templates, pages, or assets. Switzerland’s output is primarily JSON, intended for consumption client or server-side. Any platform capable of making a GET request is OK 200. Publish content to GitHub or a Dropbox and access it from your app, website, or even a web browser.

Usage

✚ gem install switzerland
✚ switz

If no arguments are provided Switzerland will inspect the local directory recursively and:

• Duplicate your content’s folder structure wherever the published content will live
• Pass any files ending in .md or .markdown through Kramdown
• Generate and save “published” HTML and JSON versions of each Markdown file
• Copy any image files alongside generated JSON/HTML

Specify a Source

One or more source files and folders can be specified just like cp. If source content is specified a publishing destination must also be provided.

✚ switz cheese overview.md published

The above command would create:

published/overview.html
published/overview.json
published/cheese/emmentaler.html
published/cheese/emmentaler.json
published/cheese/forked/jarlsberg.html
published/cheese/forked/jarlsberg.json
published/cheese/forked/leerdammer.html
published/cheese/forked/leerdammer.json
published/cheese/forked/maasdam.html
published/cheese/forked/maasdam.json

Specify a Publishing Destination

If no arguments are provided then published content will be automatically saved into a relative directory named published. This may be overridden with an argument that either appears after specified source paths or by itself as the only argument.

✚ switz cheese.md public

···

public/cheese.html
public/cheese.json

Demo

✚ echo "# Hallo" >> hallo.md
✚ switz hallo.md published
✚ ls -1 published
hallo.html
hallo.json

hallo.html

<h1>Hallo</h1>

hallo.json

{
    "anchors": [{
        "tag": "h1",
        "text": "Hallo",
        "anchor": "toc-hallo"
    }],
    "slug": "hallo",
    "body": "<h1 id=\"toc-hallo\">Hallo</h1>"
}

Syntax Highlighting

Use fenced code blocks to easily reference example code. The following format is also conveniently recognized by GitHub Flavored Markdown:

~~~ javascript
alert('hallo!');
~~~

Kramdown generates the following markup from the example above.

<pre>
    <code class="language-javascript">
        alert('hallo!');
    </code>
</pre>

If a language is specified in the opening fence it is used to generate a class as recommended. This is useful when using client-slide libraries such as google-code-prettify and Prism.js.

Go automatic with CodeRay

If the CodeRay gem is installed the above example would be automatically converted into this markup, with classes to select & style:

<div>
    alert(<span class="string"><span class="delimiter">'</span><span class="content">hallo!</span><span class="delimiter">'</span></span>);
</div>

YAML Front Matter

Provide key/value pairs in front of your Markdown content like so and they will be mixed into the published JSON:

---
layout: three-column
title: Switzerland Ain’t a Static Site Generator
---

# SAASSG

···

{
    "layout": "three-column",
    "title": "Switzerland Ain’t a Static Site Generator"
    "slug": "switzerland-aint-a-static-site-generator",
    "body": "<h1 id=\"toc-saassg\">SAASSG</h1>"
}

The following keys are reserved:

• anchors
• body
• slug