I created Van de Graaff with Ramsey Nasser to solve a number of shortcomings we identified in static site generators. We were frustrated with the assumptions the existing tools made about the type of site being created and the way data must be stored.

The tool was developed for the Eyebeam Art + Technology Center and is made freely available to the public.

Van de Graaff uses a modular architecture of pipelined functions to load, parse, and manipulate data into files. The software makes no assumptions about how you store the data—you can use any datastore with JavaScript bindings. Data moves through pipelines of composable filter functions that manipulate, and eventually output formatted content.

More information can be found on the Van de Graaff Github repository.