Or you could just install wordpress? Unless your aim is to jump through the hoops, or satisfy the nerdy carving of coding we all have.
I think a reason Jekyll is popular is because it's relatively simple to update & use once it's running. Since it's also just static HTML via your web-server, it's also significantly more secure (no app code to exploit).
That, and it's fast. Serve it with nginx and you'll endure traffic magnitudes larger than even a tweaked WP install can on a small VPS.
Jekyll is also much easier to maintain, with it's built in web server for testing, and static page generation, using a github repo is so simple it's stupid.
Jekyll is the way to go.
That's quite the over-generalization.
Update with wordpress is a click-away.
I've seen much difference between two when it comes to maintaing, having to touch databases etc.
Sure, Jekyll sounds like a more efficient solution, but most people don't have a "pain" point when running WordPress - at least not one that can't be solved with a plugin. (Most people)
I would have to agree with you. Now, as far as satisfying the craving... lately I've wanted to try Jekyll and serve the site from Amazon S3 + Cloudfront. Seems to me it would handle a tremendous amount of traffic and be very fast.
Now, if only I had content that a few million people wanted to read...
A blog is about producing and publishing content. It's not thinking about scaling when there's absolutely no need for it. If one has something worthwhile to say, then spending anything more than 5 minutes to setup a blog is just a waste of time.
That's almost like having an important meeting to get to, but taking a few weeks to reinvent the wheel just so you can get there.
I would say Cloudfront is actually overkill for a static site, I didn't really notice any decreased page load times in my testing, and having it purge the caches is another hoop you have to jump through.
There is something entirely geeky about it though, and it puts a smile on my face knowing how unnecessary the technology behind my site is.
I'd be willing to share my rakefiles for publishing this set up if anyone is interested.
There is obviously a lot to say about static blogs in general, but this is by far the upside I am most content with.
On the flip-side, figuring out how to enable gzipping and having to use a www. subdomain are nuisances people setting up their blog on Wordpress won't have to bother with - at least on a number of Wordpress hosts.