I've always preferred static blog engines myself, so consider that bias when reading these suggestions. octopress/jekyll are great. frog is okay if you want a

I've always preferred static blog engines myself, so consider that bias when reading these suggestions. octopress/jekyll are great. frog is okay if you want a more minimal octopress or are more familiar with racket or bootstrap. aesthetics are pretty blog-engine agnostic, although some engines make certain styles easier to emulate simply due to their defaults (frog uses bootstrap, for example). If you're intending to use an off-the-shelf theme it'll probably be easiest to just use the engine that theme calls for. If you are familiar with a certain mark-up language, pick an engine that supports it out of the box. Most every engine has a language it prefers, so if you're already familiar with the syntax and language you'll reduce the burden of learning the already foreign software by choosing a familiar route as far as markup languages go. Don't let it be a deciding factor though--many of the more advanced/expansive engines support changing languages on the fly. Also, consider your method of deployment. Octopress/jekyll excel at github or remote deployments over rsync, whereas frog has no deployment options and is best either paired with other tools or on the remote machine itself. (I use these three examples, but the broad point is that they all take different philosophies on the matter, and that should be considered amongst the hundreds of options that exist.)