A few pages on this site are hand-edited HTML, but the bulk of pages (and RSS feeds, etc.) are generated from text/markdown files by several small, specialized shell scripts (sh, sed, awk, and a little Perl). I generally don't even invoke the shell scripts or do "publication"; I just create/edit text files directly on the server, and let cron periodically kick off HTML-ification. OpenBSD's httpd serves the pages.
Vim, ssh, and tmux are my indispensable tools.