[0xCMP]

However, you can simplify this on your computer like I do by having a repo with your source, disabling jekyll on github, and pushing the results to the user.github.io repo so that github acts like s3 and you get a $0.00 blog.

Nice thing for S3 though is you could cloudfront it if you wanted to for some reason. And it's in your control.

[jrheard]

Yeah, I do this too - https://github.com/jrheard/blog is my source, https://github.com/jrheard/jrheard.github.io is the generated static site. This allows me to use whatever Jekyll plugins I want.

I literally wholesale copy-pasted the Rakefile in http://ixti.net/software/2013/01/28/using-jekyll-plugins-on-... in order to set this up, it was very easy thanks to that great article - all you have to do is run `rake publish` at the command line, and your site builds locally and the finished product is deployed to your github pages repo.