The markdown authoring experience is also one that I really love, personally, which is an added bonus.
Btw, checkout https://www.stackbit.com/. really good.
I haven't noticed it, otherwise I would have for sure switched by now. I have zero patience for slow downs like that.
I think it's only really slow if you make questionable decisions at the template level around tagging, categories and pagination where you could end up with deeply nested loops but you can avoid all of those problems without making compromises.
For every day writing, I run Jekyll with --incremental. Basically what this translates to is I can have my editor open and write a blog post with a browser next to it and every time I save the file it takes around 3-4 full seconds to auto-reload and see a live preview. Using --incremental only incrementally rebuilds what changed instead of everything.
This is in an absolute total worst case scenario environment too where I'm running Ruby directly inside of WSL1 and the code is mounted in from a non-SSD using an i5 3.2ghz quad core from 5 years ago. When WSL2 hits I wouldn't be surprised if it finishes in 1-2 seconds (or if you had MacOS / Linux now it would be faster too).
For builds (at deploy time) it takes around 20-30 seconds for Jekyll to create what it needs to create and push everything to my server using Ansible. This delay doesn't bother me because I run 1 command and let it do its thing while I do something else. I only run this a few times a week at most too.
Realistically 250+ posts isn't a ton but for a solo blogger it's sort of a decent amount. That was ~5 years worth of posting consistently.
But I think --incremental will save you no matter how big it gets for writing where you want a fast feedback loop.
I'm not using any Jekyll specific theme.
I started with a Bootstrap 3.x base and custom made it. I would have used Bootstrap 4.x but it wasn't out at the time.
When coming up with the design the main focus I had in mind was "minimal and readable".
I've built a ton using both Jekyll and Hugo, and while that later is speedy, its templating is extremely inflexible. The more complicated your content and the things you try to do with it, the more grim things look for it.
Bootstrap team is moving their docs to Hugo: https://blog.getbootstrap.com/2019/02/11/bootstrap-4-3-0/#br...
I'd link the damn thing but I don't want to dox myself.
I do want to stress though that in that case, Hugo's speed wasn't a positive enough tradeoff vs worse templating to switch.
We used both on a case by case basis there. A few dozen online properties. Hugo got used on the simplest stuff, often 4-5 page lead generation sites which is about 30% of what that company did. Speed of builds/deployment is basically the same there, but with Hugo the tooling/pipeline was much simpler.
What's the pricing for this? There's no mention on the website
I currently use it for:
- My personal blog with 250+ posts and tons of pages[0]
- A podcast platform[1] which is open source[2]
- The landing pages for all of my web development courses (not going to bother linking them since I don't want to seem like I'm fishing HN for sales)
I also recently wrote about my whole site's tech stack here[3]. That post might not fully apply to you since you want to host it on S3. I personally self host everything on DigitalOcean but using S3 wouldn't be a problem.
You mentioned "static assets" and this is where Jekyll shines IMO. The jekyll-assets plugin (optional) will md5 tag your assets for cache busting and bundle your scss / JS too. It's really handy and avoids having to set up more complicated tools. It pretty much works out of the box with close to zero configuration.
The plugin system is nice too. You can do some really useful things like automatically add certain rel attributes to external links with a few dozen lines of Ruby. It's very handy for a blog.
[0]: https://nickjanetakis.com/
[1]: https://runninginproduction.com/
[2]: https://github.com/nickjj/runninginproduction.com
[3]: https://runninginproduction.com/interviews/1-100k-page-views...