Monkeyman rising

During the last couple of months, I got so repulsed by having to use Blogger for blogging, that all blogging activity came to a grinding halt. I seriously searched for other solutions, including Tumblr, Jekyll and Middleman, but none of them seemed to cut it in the end.

Middleman actually came close. I love it. It's awesome. Until it's not. And then you need to be a Ruby programmer to truly understand what's going on. Having to learn Ruby just to write a blog just didn't feel right.

So then, on February 3, I tweeted this:

A friend a mine send me a link to Jekyll. Other than that, it stayed quiet. That's when I decided I had waited long enough. I had spent countless hours trying to twist Middleman's arm to do what I wanted to do, all in vain. Enough is enough.

So three days later, I went like:

In all honesty, it didn't do much yet. It generated something from the commandline. But it didn't have any of the fancy stuff yet. (LESS support, live preview and all of that.)

This morning I completed a version that is pretty usable, I'd say. I feel safe to start moving some of my existing sites over to a solution based on that version of Monkeyman. Behold: the Monkeyman: