#BiD Generator ##An extremely simple static site generator for bobisdoomed.com

###What? Bob is Doomed is a humourous comic strip about a desperate man and the manifold perils he encounters as an office drone in a world going mad. bidgenerator is a Ruby script that applies a template to a set of comic strips, producing a static website.

###Why? While a huge number of comic-strip sites run on Wordpress using the ComicPress or Easel themes, these have a few disadvantages:

• They require one to host and maintain Wordpress, its dependencies, the respective theme, and a bevy of plugins
• The dynamically-generated nature of the resulting site carries considerable performance overhead, usually mitigated by bolting on additonal Wordpress plugins
• The resulting websites, all born from a common theme, look extremely similar unless considerable work is done to create a unique child theme

Nonetheless, most amateur comic creators are neither web designers nor developers: they have to take what they can get, unless they can afford to hire professionals. As a developer, I have an alternative. Building my own site generator has a few advantages:

• It gives me a chance to build something using Ruby, a language to which I'd like more exposure
• It gives me a chance to improve my front-end web development skills
• The resulting site is extremely fast, amenable to optimizations like caching proxies, and can be hosted basically anywhere
• With full control over the generated CSS, HTML, etc., I can develop and deploy changes rapidly, and rolling back is as simple as replacing the static files from backup

###Where? ####(is it going) #####(the roadmap, in other words)

• Get object-oriented
  • Encapsulate the strip info in an object we can pass around, instead of setting a mass of variables
  • Pull page and (eventual) RSS generation into their own classes
• Add an RSS feed generator, since several of our very small number of readers thus far have requested a feed
• Add the ability to track what's been generated and what's up next
  • This will let us point to the main repository of all strip PSDs as input, instead of to a copy that contains only the current strips
  • Important for future automation
• Get script fit to be run automatically, so I can set a job to run at midnight on posting days rather than (hangs head in guilt) having to run the script and push the results to the server myself
• Integrate blog posts into the generator, so Chris and I can dump posts as simple date- or strip-indexed text Markdown files in a folder, and have them spat onto the correct pages