Plerd

 Plerd  is a free and open-source static site generator project developed by, optimized for use with single-user blogs. Initially created in 2014, Plerd runs Jason's weekly blog, Fogknife, as well as a handful of other blogs around the internet.

Plerd in a nutshell
Plerd focuses on providing a minimal interface, with the user updating their blog's content by manipulating files using their own filesystem and text editor, and not running any particular blog-specific commands. A Plerd user creates a new post by adding a Markdown file to a directory watched by a daemon process, which will convert it into HTML using customizable templates stored elsewhere. One updates a post by editing its Markdown source file in-place, and un-publishes it by moving it away from the source directory.

Plerd has an informational page listing its primary features on Jason's personal website, as well as a public GitHub repository that includes more complete documentation. Jason gave a 20-minute talk about Plerd's initial development at the 2015 Perl Conference.

Plerd and the IndieWeb
Starting in early 2018, Jason began work on an experimental branch of Plerd that supports IndieWeb features, beginning with complete support for Webmention -- both sending and receiving. Plerd's production branch began supporting Webmention with version 1.6 in August 2018. Jason continues to focus on improving Webmention support and adding other IndieWeb features to Plerd, in public and dogfooded, with the latest committed code always running live on Fogknife.

As part of this work, Jason developed two IndieWeb-related libraries for Perl, Web::Microformats2 and Web::Mention. Both are available for public use as free and open-source software.

Also in the meantime, Jason has updated the default templates in Plerd's main branch to include microformats2 markup.

Articles

 * 2018-08-19 State of the Plerd, 2018