BUT THERE'S NO CACTUSES.

I tried a bunch of similar static site generators: mixure, wintersmith, yeoman, middleman, roots, etc etc. They all fell short in some way or another.

Then I taught myself to use grunt.js. It was kind of a PITA to get the hang of (apparently gulp.js is way easier) but I definitely saw the light. Grunt is what a lot of these other tools use "under the hood", you define the things you want to do ahead of time (for ex: "compile my coffeescript and scss, then move the images in this folder to another folder") and it does them when your source files change. My advice: ditch the fluff, just learn how to use a task runner to compile your files yourself :)

Here's my boilerplate to help you get started. It does stylus, jade, coffeescript, a web server, and live reload out of the box: https://github.com/sampl/grunt-boilerplate. AWS deployment with one command is pretty straightforward, ask me if you need help!

This looks pretty close to Hammer. Going to give it a shot and see how it stacks up.

I've been working on this Mac product for the last couple of months with Koen Bok and Benjamin Nathan. Curious to hear what everyone thinks about Cactus!

Kinda undecided if I should go for this or Mixture (as mentioned before).

Mixture FTW!

Beautiful website.

Haven't tried it yet, but the description makes it sound like Jekyll with a designer-friendly local environment.

EDIT: Bingo! It's a designer-friendly Jekyll-like environment. If I didn't have free github hosting with Jekyll I'd buy it right now :P

Is this any different than using Yeoman/Grunt to scaffold a webapp?

Wow, looks really slick!

It's interesting that we're seeing a lot of new services re-imagining hosting static sites. Why do you think that is? I'd say partly due to rise of Javascript-based SPA's which just integrate into various 3rd party services and don't need their own server. Also, it seems like more and more web designers are looking to build their own products from end-to-end and are comfortable with programming, but don't want to get involved with managing their own server, command line interfaces.

Oh, and a shameless plug. If you don't feel like installing additional apps, be sure to check out http://brace.io. We also deploy your sites to S3 (and a CDN), but do it via Dropbox.

I currently work for larger corporations where Cactus is nearly impossible to use, since they work with large and already existing, complex systems. However, having followed Jorn and Koen for a while now, I know they make great stuff, so I immediately bought this app when I saw a post on Dribbble yesterday.

Today, during lunch break, I played with the app for a bit; the interface is insanely simple and friendly, the app does everything it promises you it does. I'm sure a lot of people can benefit from Cactus, even with clients who use Wordpress in the end. Simply export your files and create a theme from it. I will be using this the app for future clients, who are less rigid in their infrastructure and will allow me to implement crazy new designs in HTML/CSS.

And oh, I'm not familiar with the templating system, but the documentation showed me it's pretty simple to use :-)

Cactus looks cool, unfortunately, mac only :(

I personally use Prepros on my windows environment. Free, cross-os compatible, and sexy as hell. Have a look, guys!

Neat! Trying this out today.

Looks a lot like http://mixture.io/

This looks rather useful!

Excited to try this! FYI for people not upgraded to Mavericks yet, it's 10.9+ only