[drwu]

I totally agree. Just using a POSIX shell to concatenate header/footer and include the required CSS file, a simple static blog generator can be easily made. (That is what I did with mine.)

No Markdown, no Perl/Python/Ruby, also no binary program, just a few simple shell scripts and plain HTML files.

[tiehuis]

Using a portable minimal markdown dependency (such as cmark [1]) I think markdown can be quite a low barrier here. I personally do similar to what you have described on my blog, with an additional cmark conversion and find it quite simple [2].

[1] https://github.com/commonmark/cmark

[2] https://github.com/tiehuis/tiehuis.github.io/blob/38b0fd58a2...