[alabut]

You just described pre-Google Blogger and everything I loved about it back in the day.

I was a huge fan early on in my career of using Blogger for both work and play. It was a really flexible generator of markup files - it didn't have to be HTML, so I'd use to make RSS/XML that would get piped into XSLT to make contact directories or into a Flash site for art projects, all while keeping an easy admin interface for various people to contribute their content.

I really wanted Blogger to succeed on its own. I took an Adaptive Path workshop with Ev when it was just him and Jason running things and begged him to take my money for a premium account. He said creating a Blogger Pro was a popular request and they were working on it, but then shortly after they got acquired by Google and it wasn't long before it went downhill, especially when it stopped being a static file generator and became a bad Wordpress clone (no plugins, for example).

That's what I love about Jekyll. What's old is new again and I'm pretty much trying to recreate that great setup from 5-10 years ago for my current projects. Content-centric sites want to be in HTML, not rendered on the fly by app/centric frameworks.