Metalsmith is cool! I hadn't heard of it til now but it looks sweet. I actually made something similar except mine isn't designed for static sites specifically

Metalsmith is cool! I hadn't heard of it til now but it looks sweet. I actually made something similar except mine isn't designed for static sites specifically. It just takes markdown, parses it into HTML (with code highlighting of course) and stores the html and frontmatter in an in memory sqlite database that gets rebuilt each time you save. Not the most efficient choice, but it makes plugging it into any front end framework like nuxt or next or svelte really easy, particularly if they have server side rendering. I guess it's almost halfway between this and PicoCMS. And you get full text search.