Much of the diserable functionality for a modern website is delivered via community extensions for the Pelican package. I provides instructions for certain examples in this post, including the Disqus Comments extension.
A Pelican theme is a must if building a GitHub page or other static site with Pelican. This post details how to leverage the large number of community built themes to easily style a Pelican site.
The second static site generator I used was the Python package Pelican, which is a good alternate to Jekyll for creating a GitHub Personal Page. My post summarizes a few of the benefits as well as how to use it in a basic way.