[robertnealan]

This. Current static site generators aren't good for non-engineers, but I'd be willing to bet that doesn't need to be the case. Every instance I've seen requires some sort of technical know-how, or integration with Dropbox/Drive/etc (which many non-technical/older people won't necessarily be familiar with).

Has anyone ever tried building a standalone desktop writing app that handles everything for you? I'm just imaging an app where I can buy a domain/hosting, give it my user creds if needed, and it automatically sets everything up for me in a clean interface without needing to know anything about servers/DNS/etc.

[narrowrail]

I think one could use Github's electron (on which Atom is based) and one of the open source WYSIWYGs (possibly tweaked) to get the standalone app you seem to be indicating. Taking one of the slimmer SSGs and packaging it alongside still may result in quite a large binary (not sure).

As for hosting, Amazon's s3 seems the most appropriate. While you could automate domain registration and DNS records, I'm not sure how.

This seems like it could be an interesting project.

[carussell]

I think that's the gestalt of Live Writer, which has been recently open sourced, but it's still Windows-only, so I can't say for sure because I've never personally tried it.