The old nerdErg website has been with us since 2012 when we wrote "Groupie" a CMS website generator that, at the time, was pretty special in that you could edit on the page WYSIWYG style. You could create layouts and blogs and assets all on the fly in real time.

It was never "finished" of course, but has been used for several dozen sites. The problem with it for me was the problem I have with all WYSIWYG editors (including MS Word); you never really know what’s going on. You start a numbered list and can have a lot of trouble figuring out where it ends, and continuing numbering etc.

I have long liked markdown, but it never quite felt it was enough for a website. It was definitely enough for a blog post. But I have since become an absolute convert to simpler ASCII mark-up, especially for documentation, with the wonderful AsciiDoc and Asciidoctor.

Yes this post was written with Asciidoctor and JBake. I wanted to switch to a static site generator a long time ago, and we at nerdErg indeed played with different tools including a Javascript driven wiki. But wonderful as Markdown and AsciiDoc is you need templating and to be able to just do not so plain old HTML, which is where JBake comes in. It’s not perfect but with Groovy templating it does most things I need, and the fact I can use good ol' Git to save/version/push my sites around makes it pretty damn good for me.