I want to try a new free place to host my dev blog, and currently use Wordpress.com free hosting. I don't like most of the free themes they have to offer, and the ones that work still don't let me customize them enough to my liking. So I'm looking for something more flexible.

I recently heard about Jekyll and how it integrates with your GitHub account to make website or portfolio for your programming projects. Now here's what I don't get. As it advertises itself as "blog-aware", can it be a direct substitute for WordPress? If it's hosted online why do you need RubyGems for its setup?

Jekyll generates static pages (i.e. plain HTML/CSS/JavaScript) that you can upload to a suitable host (such as your GitHub account). There's nothing running server-side (PHP, etc.), it's all pre-processed "offline" on your own computer.

By "blog aware" they mean that it can generate category and tag pages, archives, etc., but it's not a direct replacement for something like WordPress - you would need something like Disqus to add commenting thanks to the lack of a database and server-side backend for example, where WordPress just provides this out of the box.

et1337 talks a bit about using Jekkyl in this post (where he switched his blog to Jekkyl), and briefly again in this follow-up (where he liked it so much he decided to use it for his game's site as well).