[minimaxir]

> Then everyone and their mother started doing static blogs

It helps that Jekyll, one such static blog, was also pushed by GitHub back in the day.

[lblume]

Was Jekyll ever that popular though?

[nirvdrum]

I can’t provide usage numbers, but it used to be the happy path for using GitHub Pages. I suppose static site generation was fairly niche so “popular” may not be the right word. I think Jekyll was a big fish in a little pond, however.

[johannes1234321]

It certainly populated the "Mark Town to static HTML" blogging approach and created the room for its successors.