I highly recommend taking a look at http://middlemanapp.com if you're considering Jekyll. I gave a talk at RailsConf (http://bradgessler.com/talks/middleman-frontend/) about static website generators and found that Middleman handles everything Jekyll does in a much more modular, more "railsy" way by using tilt, sprockets, and all that good stuff.
It seems like there is a gigantic living, breathing ecosystem made of these SSGs now, with Jekyll being the favorite for people who are inclined to seek out the one that has the most stuff written about it, or the largest community. Can't say I disagree with that method of selecting software, either.
When I found out about Hugo yesterday, after comparing a list of others which must have been a few weeks too old to include the latest hotness, I almost collapsed at my keyboard. Developed in Go, distributed as a binary. Hokay. So now you can pretty much narrow your choice down to the language, then the software architecture, then the amount of activity on Github, then the license, then the corresponding "ideal website as created by SSG package X" output, then the attitudes of the authors on your favorite social networks, and finally you can probably look up the authors' girlfriends too (don't do that) and compare by girlfriend.
On top of that, the static output is dropped into gigantic pools of resources that can scale to an unimaginable degree, can probably handle hundreds of DDOSes at a time, and they probably all validate without so much as a yellow flag. Oh and if you want you can use this tool to write an API, or if you want you can just not build a site with it, because it includes a game of Nibbles which is also static in some funny way, or whatever.
It's amazing and absolutely ridiculous at the same time. In some ways it's an almost pornographic exploitation of process that cares approximately 0% about content. But it's also a huge display of generosity and demonstrates some very serious attention to craft.
I second this. I recently discovered Middleman and the experience is very familiar to Rails, in a good way. There are also many amazing plugins, such as one to automatically deploy to S3.
The sentiment (that'd you'd want to use something that's "railsy" for making static pages) sounds completely batshit crazy to me -- but given the number of upvotes and (sane-sounding) supporting comments, I suppose there might be something to it. I'll have a look, even if I'm more in the camp that thinks "how does any of this improve on m4 anyway"...
I suppose it really does demonstrate that rails has great mind-share and a lot of developers still using it (and enjoying using it) -- which is great. Still a little surprised there's so much apparent overlap between people that thing that "hey rails is a great way to make web-apps", and people that thing "static html is great for content". Perhaps an indication of how "ajax-driven" web development have forced everyone to look at webapps as api+rendering -- and how (apparently) well rails have been adopted to that design (because, I'm guessing, everyone's been forced to break their architecture into a view/template layer that's driven by data --- much like a well-structured coldfusion, asp or php app -- but with ajax).
I highly recommend taking a look at http://middlemanapp.com if you're considering Jekyll. I gave a talk at RailsConf (http://bradgessler.com/talks/middleman-frontend/) about static website generators and found that Middleman handles everything Jekyll does in a much more modular, more "railsy" way by using tilt, sprockets, and all that good stuff.