[krapp]

>What really amazes me is that there isn't a similar blogging platform that is open source, easy to deploy and at least a little visually pleasing.

That's literally Wordpress. Installed by default on almost every shared host anywhere. There's even a free tier on wordpress.com.

I've tried static site generators - Lektor was the latest - but every one of them fell short of what I wanted in some way or another. But Wordpress always works.