toto - Close-to-the-metal blogging on top of Rack

Take a look around the small site web landscape and it’s clear we’re not in Kansas anymore. It’s no longer a foregone conclusion that a new blog or brochure site should be built on a CMS or even web framework. Toto is the latest in a rising breed of static page generators.

Toto dumps the database and stores its content in plain text files. Its built on top of Rack and is Heroku & Varnish friendly so that your site will scream on even a free single dyno.

From the README, here’s how Toto works:

• content is entirely managed through git; you get full fledged version control for free.
• articles are stored as .txt files, with embeded metadata (in yaml format).
• articles are processed through a markdown converter (rdiscount) by default.
• templating is done through ERB.
• toto is built right on top of Rack.
• toto was built to take advantage of HTTP caching.
• toto was built with heroku in mind.
• comments are handled by disqus
• individual articles can be accessed through urls such as /2009/11/21/blogging-with-toto
• the archives can be accessed by year, month or day, wih the same format as above.
• arbitrary metadata can be included in articles files, and accessed from the templates.
• summaries are generated intelligently by toto, following the :max setting you give it.
• you can also define how long your summary is, by adding ~ at the end of it (:delim).

To get started quickly, clone the default template Dorothy and deploy to Heroku in a snap.

[Source on GitHub]