Developers just find that workflow sublime, and since we're often making websites for ourselves or for our companies, it only makes sense that we've started to use tools that fit our mentality.
I had a little blog I posted to every few months, and one day I found it vandalised from my out of date wordpress.
Another reason is the rise of version control for small projects, and the way static sites fit nicely into a Git workflow.
It makes getting good, scalable performance basically trivial. Static content distributed across CDNs means someone else solves that problem for you at low cost. Forget SQL injections and usually forget XSS. If you need a comments section, you realistically need outside help to filter out spam anyway, might as well use something like Disqus. Also, very few moving parts to break after deploy.
- you can source control your blog content
- update your blog without ever leaving command line terminal or having to use less productive web interface
- use markdown, textile, html or whatever suits you
- easy to host and easy to scale
- no need to feel obligated to apply security patches
For me these are great reasons to migrate away from WordPress, Drupal and so on.
- Hard to create feeds
- Search is left to google
- Mostly impossible to use for photoblogging and anything that requires mobile
etc.
My small vanity site has an update once a month or so. I use Linux at home. I hacked a few bash scripts to get a basic flow going...
* edit text file with markdown (vim or gedit). Save to a directory in dropbox that has images and files under it
* run a script that runs markdown and adds a header and footer
* run a script that adds the new page to an index
* run a script that invokes lftp that uploads the changed files to server space
What I do find amusing is the range of really heavy duty technology that some of the static Web site generators are using.