Recently I received a small flurry of patches to my blog compiler, from Chris Frey. These patches significantly speedup rebuilding a static blog when using Danga's memcached.
The speedup is sufficiently fast that my prior SQLite based approach is no longer required - and (re)building my blog now takes on the order of 5 seconds.
On the topic of other people's blogs I've been enjoying David Watson's recent photo challenge. I was almost tempted to join in, but I'm not sure I could manage one every day - Although I can pretend I recently carried out my my first real photoshoot.
I'm still taking pictures of "things/places" but I'm starting to enjoy "people" more. With a bit of luck I'll get some more people to pose in the near future, even if I have to rely upon posting to gumtree for local bodies!
ObFilm: Love Actually
You could try Tokyo Cabinet or Tokyo Tyrant as a replacement for memcached. Got a tenfold speed increase in some test cases.
In this case storing blog entries in memory to avoid having to read 600 text files is a cute optimistation
It is possible there are faster solutions, but in practise this is fast enough.