If you're familiar with working on large template driven CMS websites, you might occasionally find yourself looking for some light weight alternatives. Perhaps you have a project that doesn't have budget for backend development but which would benefit from a powerful design template system. Or maybe you have the technical requirement for your site to use static HTML files instead of a dynamic server application. Or for whatever reason you decide you just don't need a web-based CMS admin tool.

Meet the static website generator. This is a set of tools that can compile and publish a fully static website from templates and content files. When you want to make an update, you change the content in a series of simple text files, run a publish script that generates a new version of the full site, and upload the new files to your server.

There's a whole slew of these available for various coding environments and languages. We've reviewed and worked with a few of the ruby-based ones (namely Jekyll & Bonsai). We used Jekyll for the Google for Veterans and Families project as a way to easily apply a few consistent design templates to 50 pages of content for a quick turn around. I also really enjoyed working with Bonsai on my personal site to create a very flexible page hierarchy and navigation that can be altered just by re-arranging or re-naming folders. Jekyll has a lot of community support and is intended to be more of a blogging platform than a free-form page-based website.

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TwitterSketch is the result of some experiments I've been doing lately using the Twitter API (via Tweetr) to control dynamic Flash animations.

It searches Twitter for the most recent posts that contain either direction words ("up" "down" "left" or "right") or color words ("red" "blue" "green" etc). The drawing 'cursor' creates circles of varying sizes and fades older circles over time. The app reads Twitter results word by word - when a matching word comes up it either moves the cursor or changes the color. If the word doesn't match, the cursor continues drawing at the last color or position. New results are fetched every 20 seconds, causing a slight delay between realtime posts and visual output.

As words become more frequent, overall moods and motion trends will start to appear. For example, it seems that "up" is generally more frequently used than "down".

The more I watch the animation, the more ideas come to mind including future explorations on mining public data sources (like Twitter) to graph trends or just to creating interesting artistic systems that are essentially controlled by the public subconscious.

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