I use and highly recommend hexo.io with it's S3 deployment plugin. It's as good as Jekyll but easier to modify and theme if you come from a web dev background as it's written in NodeJS rather than Ruby.
> It's as good as Jekyll but easier to modify and theme if you could from a web dev background as it's written in NodeJS rather than Ruby.
Er, are you implying that Ruby is not a language for people with a web development background?
Regardless, most of Jekyll tweaking is done with Liquid templates, which are mostly agnostic. (You do use Ruby for plugins, yes, but they are not super important.)
Behind the scenes it's just running the usual packages for templates, markdown, minification etc., so for a fresh build it's about as fast as any typical grunt-based setup. But AFAICT it correctly detects when things don't need to be regenerated, so incremental builds are quite fast no matter what, unless you're editing templates.
I recently converted my wordpress blog to hexo and blogged about it, if you're interested:
I wanted the same, ie speed with ease of templating, so I made Griffin[1] which uses handlebars templates and can parse 5000 markdown pages in ~8 seconds on my machine.
It's not blazingly fast but it's good enough for me - a blog with about 50 posts takes about 30 seconds to deploy from a clean start. It does sensible things like caching the json database and only generating new posts.
