Currently I'm heavily into learning Jekyll but also interested in the alternatives. In terms of a CMS I'm also looking at https://getgrav.org (but haven't started learning this yet).
Hopefully others will find this an interesting questions and I look forward to all your replies.
Yes, I use Jekyll for my own site and a few other projects. I maintain a couple Jekyll plugins, jekyll-language-plugin and jekyll-email-protect, just to name two.
I didn't replace anything, deploy on GitHub pages with a custom domain and it is fabulously easy to use your own HTML/CSS/JS.
Yes, I use hubpress (http://hubpress.io/) I like not doing like the majority, so I did search something else than jekyll This has replaced a self coded blog that was not suiting my requirements and I was lazy to upgrade it It is on github pages, and I don't have anything to do on my own laptop 'cause it has a built-in administration tool It uses some Ghost themes, so you can create your own themes
I tryed grav too and can tell you it is very good and very extensible too, but you need PHP so github pages doesn't work
After asking my original question that was related. I'm close to settling on Hugo. It is super fast and is supported by sites like netlify.
As @sandeep said, you should take a look at the available discussion. As for your sixth question, I want recommend taking a peek at my answer to the question about what you should know as a (full stack) web developer, just to get the gist of how much work it is to make a professional site.
p.s.: I am working on the story. Progress @ ~60%
Paul Watts
Love life-long learning and sharing knowledge
Sandeep Panda
co-founder, Hashnode
Hi Paul,
We had a similar discussion a few days ago. You can check it out here. It doesn't answer all the questions you asked, but is a good read. :)