I highly recommend skeleton.css (getskeleton.com) as a minimal theme for bootstrapping any website. Almost no learning curve, and it looks good, even if you don't use the HTML it prefers.

That said, I have customized it a bit, but it's fine right out of the game, especially the typography.

While this is slightly off-topic, does anyone have any current opinions on Jekyll / Pelican / Middleman / etc?

In particular websites which are only part blog.

Always nice to see works striving for minimalism. Years ago I was also looking for a simple theme, bumped into Scribble, and forked into Klotter (swedish for scribble).

Source: https://github.com/blogandreineculaucom/blogandreineculaucom...

Theme live at: http://blog.andreineculau.com (blog content not so much alive)

FYI: The Dr Jekyll's Themes Directory @ http://drjekyllthemes.github.io lists 100+ ready-to-use (fork) Jekyll themes including some more minimal themes.

It doesn't seem to support pagination, e.g. 10 posts per page, next/prev buttons, etc. Is that a Jekyll limitation, or a theme limitation? If the latter, would a reasonably competent Jekyll user be able to implement that?

My blog is fairly minimal and also built with Jekyll, and licensed under MIT. Anyone is welcome to repurpose it for their needs:

https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sircmpwn.github.io

Great theme! Are there any disadvantages to using Disqus as a commenting system?

I recommend Urubu (http://urubu.jandecaluwe.com/) for building static websites.