Can anyone recommend a static website generator -- as opposed to my current hand-rolled setup?

For my blog (see profile) I got extremely lazy and just dumped wordpress on a subdomain, because I wanted to allow comments and didn't want to think about design or anything but just posting stuff once a week or so.

Further, I've been wanting to add a blog to the site as well. Is there any reason I should avoid using statically generated html files for a blog?

Thank you, Joost. Glad to hear someone else does it frontier-style as well. ;-)

Regarding the blog, I don't think I need anything as fancy as WP, but just need to decide between simple generated static files, and (probably) blosxom. I notice the links at the blosxom site look just like static urls, so, both alternatives will look the same to the user anyway.

Even if you're going with CGI scripts (no mod_perl but dynamic content) it's reasonably easy to have nice-looking urls that don't even show the actually executed script. One commonly used option is to configure a url-to-script mapping using mod_rewrite. mod_proxy mod_rewrite should be available and configurable via .htaccess files on most hosts that provide CGI.
"What should it profit a man, if he should win a flame war, yet lose his cool?"

I believe blosxom is on par with what you're seeking. Not sure if it meets your needs 100% but it's worth a look.

Thanks naChoZ. On the plus side, it looks like it's just a CGI script, so that should work fine with the hosting arrangement I have (no mod_perl). I'll have to read the docs and have a closer look.

I don't really know if this is what you're looking for, but I really like what Yggdrasil is offering in terms of both template and static-generated site. I've been testing it to see whether it can be used for hosting both a site and a blog on it. Although eventually you'll want to invest in a more dynamic environment, especially once you have more than a few posts and definitely if you'll want to have any form of comments.