I agree with the sentiment of the article and the extreme usability of FP. It was easy for anyone to create a website for recipes or knitting designs and to publish it to your corner of the web.

For the longest time, I've felt that an open source project that basically mimicked it would be a great idea. (And for all those widgets, it should be easy to have those operate in asp.net or php... Bring back the page counter!)

For all those static site generators out there (I've written 4), I'd still use a FP clone that edited HTML, rather than markdown, or other.

The closest thing seems to be WordPress, but it lacks one fundamental thing: it's not a desktop app, and requires server config (db and user login).

I think it fair to state that with the demise of FP, (& then flash), the web became too 'professional' as the grandma and 10yo were pushed aside for the semantic web. I still feel strongly that it can all come back with a nice desktop app that worked offline.