Projects

My project mostly centers on Metalsmith, a static site generator built on a simple idea: everything is a plugin. Each plugin performs one focused transformation on a set of files, and complex functionality emerges from combining these simple pieces.

Over the past two years, Claude has become my primary development partner. The pairing works because Metalsmith's patterns are explicit — when I describe a plugin's intended transformation, Claude grasps the files-in, files-out contract immediately. Most of the plugins and tools documented here emerged from this collaboration.

All projects are available on GitHub and NPM.

If you're a nonprofit organization looking for web development help, I'm available for pro-bono work.

MCP Server

Metalsmith Plugin MCP Server — An MCP server that gives AI assistants Metalsmith-specific knowledge. It provides automated plugin scaffolding, validation against ecosystem best practices, and maintenance tools that follow established patterns from core Metalsmith plugins.

Plugins

Focused Metalsmith plugins, each performing one transformation. Expand any plugin for its description and links.

metalsmith-bundled-components

Automates asset management for component-based architectures. Scans component directories for CSS and JavaScript, resolves dependencies with circular-reference detection, and generates correctly-ordered bundles with scope isolation.

metalsmith-section-pages

Generates structured-content pages composed of validated library sections, turning a frontmatter sections array into a fully rendered page.

metalsmith-mdn

Bridges structured templates and long-form content by enabling Nunjucks components within markdown files. Embed the same reusable components used in page templates directly into markdown content.

metalsmith-markdown-partials

Enables content composition through reusable markdown fragments. Processes include markers in markdown files, replacing them with content from separate partial files during the build.

metalsmith-unified-markdown

Renders markdown to HTML using the unified/remark ecosystem, opening the door to the full range of remark plugins for content processing.

metalsmith-prism

Adds server-side syntax highlighting to code blocks in rendered HTML using Prism.js, with no client-side JavaScript required.

metalsmith-optimize-html

Optimizes HTML output through comprehensive minification without external dependencies. Removes unnecessary whitespace, comments, and redundant attributes while normalizing URLs and boolean attributes.

metalsmith-optimize-images

Generates responsive images with optimal formats and sizes, producing srcset-ready variants during the build.

metalsmith-site-data

Emits read-only build artifacts (pages.json and site-data.json) that expose the site's page and metadata structure to external tools and integrations.

metalsmith-menu-plus

Automatic hierarchical navigation generator. Builds nested menu structures from the file tree with active-state and permalink awareness.

metalsmith-blog-lists

Adds blog list metadata (recent posts, tags, archives) for rendering navigation and index widgets.

metalsmith-sectioned-blog-pagination

Generates paginated blog landing pages from a marker template, built for section-based blog architectures.

metalsmith-simple-pagination

A lightweight pagination plugin that creates paginated directory pages from any collection.

metalsmith-safe-links

Strips protocol and hostname from local links and adds safe-linking attributes to external links.

metalsmith-seo

Comprehensive SEO optimization that generates meta tags, Open Graph tags, Twitter Cards, JSON-LD structured data, sitemaps, and robots.txt with automatic metadata derivation and content analysis.

metalsmith-search

Creates a client-side search index from rendered HTML using Fuse.js for fuzzy matching and Cheerio for HTML parsing. Extracts content with automatic heading-ID generation and scroll-to functionality.

metalsmith-multilingual

Adds internationalization metadata to files, linking translations across locales so templates can render language switchers and hreflang alternates.

Nunjucks Components

Nunjucks Components — A library of reusable, self-contained components for building structured-content websites with Metalsmith. Each component manages its own styles, scripts, and templates, and declares dependencies through a manifest file. The companion site provides reference documentation, live examples, and downloadable component packages.

Starters

Metalsmith Structured Content Starter — A component-based starter demonstrating modern web development patterns without JavaScript frameworks. Uses structured content in frontmatter to define reusable page sections, with automatic CSS and JS bundling per component. See a demo.

Reference Projects

Ruhrpott — A proof-of-concept integrating Sanity.io as a CMS with Metalsmith for static site generation.

Minneapolis — A proof-of-concept using WordPress as a headless CMS with Metalsmith, pulling content via the WordPress REST API.