[subpixel]

Different, but also interesting:

http://get-serve.com/

"Serve provides the equivalent of the Views part of the Rails MVC. Edit and tweak your websites on-the-fly with the Serve server. And when you are ready to deploy, you have two options. Either export to a pure HTML static site or deploy the source on any Ruby-friendly web host."

One of many interesting ways to design/build a static site. You could then basically use Jekyll as a deploy tool to GitHub pages.

As a designer, I can attest the difficulty of developing using Jekyll, b/c to see your work you need to switch on the Jekyll server, and no changes will compile until you flip the switch again. I know Octopress fixes that, but I'm still wrestling with how to ditch the included theme and build my own.