I'm incredibly biased because I'm part of the WordPress community, but IMHO the static-posting model employed by Jekyll (and I guess fading-stalwart Movable Type) is fundamentally flawed for two reasons:
1) you are penalized for writing more and more content as your rebuild time will increase the more posts you have.
2) you cannot have any dynamic content that queries the database or dynamically builds the page other than at build-time.
I'm not sure whether the gem created by the OP is the holy-grail of Ruby based blogging, but it does seem as though Jekyll's current popularity is because it's the only decent Rails-based blogging tool out there, not because it's particularly well suited to the task.
Hey, we're using jekyll (0.11.x) to generate http://dev.af83.com/ which is about 320 posts. It always takes less than 30secs on my laptop (Lenovo X220).
1) you are penalized for writing more and more content as your rebuild time will increase the more posts you have.
2) you cannot have any dynamic content that queries the database or dynamically builds the page other than at build-time.
I'm not sure whether the gem created by the OP is the holy-grail of Ruby based blogging, but it does seem as though Jekyll's current popularity is because it's the only decent Rails-based blogging tool out there, not because it's particularly well suited to the task.