A static site is an interesting idea. Fairly hassle free, handles high-traffic well, and a much lower chance of getting hacked. However, they’re a nightmare to manage if you want any sort of consistent look. But maybe not.

Jekyll (Github) is a Ruby project for generating and maintaining a static site or blog.

Octopress gives you templates and some fancy plugins that make the engine quite a bit more friendlier.  Now all of a sudden, a static blog is looking very doable.