Ease of authoring could affect your posting frequency and dedication to the blog. I recently was in the same dilemma when looking to start a technical blog and

Ease of authoring could affect your posting frequency and dedication to the blog. I recently was in the same dilemma when looking to start a technical blog and looked at Jekyll, Octopress and Ghost. I avoided WordPress because I don't need plugins or pain of setup, etc. and I wanted to host the blog myself. I used Octopress before and was seriously considering it. The problem I had with Octopress (and by relation Jekyll) was the effort to create or edit posts. I had Octopress files locally and would publish via sftp to my server. It just felt clunky and became a barrier. I chose Ghost for my blog and the authoring process is awesome compared to Octopress. Ghost uses Markdown and has a live preview. I can create posts anywhere via authoring on a tablet. Since I'm hosting it myself I feel like I can put other things on my server if I need to (like D3.js, etc.) Now I'm no expert on blogging but I do like using Ghost over the past month or so. If your blog has good content that people find value in, as long as it doesn't have a horrible design then what it looks like won't matter much.