For a long time, it has been said that blogs, wikis and CMS systems are the domains of PHP and nothing else. However, it seems that other languages are discovering this area and are doing just fine, or, even better.
For example, Bricolage also seems to feature a blog mode. It is a Perl based CMS, and as such, performs exceptionally well. It seems that running it on a server requires much less ressources (which means that much more people are capable of accessing it in parallel) than a comparable PHP solution.
Yes, Compiled PHP can improve this situation somewhat, but compiled PHP still seems to be somewhat slower than uncompiled Perl (which is largely due to the fact that the Perl interpreter precompiles all of its code on load, so there's not much of a difference). On the other side, pre-compiling Perl is also possible, and reduces the load speed somewhat. This is only remarkable when running Perl as a CGI or something comparable, because this will require Perl modules to be loaded every time the script is called. The solution to this problem is, for example, mod_perl.
A good solution for Wikis appears to be MoinMoin. It is capable of exporting the pages to HTML once they're written, so it can be used to produce static content which can be loaded at full speed because it does not need to be regenerated all the time. This is a significant advantage over, for example, Mediawiki, which needs to go though the code required in generating a page every time it is being accessed. This slows down the server significantly.
For minimalists, there is a similarly efficient solution for blogs: Bash Blogger. It is a complete blogging engine, including RSS support, navigation links, and a Google search plugin. It should be easy though to replace it and make it link to the BSD projects search engine or other search engines instead.
One of the major problems with Bash Blogger is that it is, as the name suggests, Bash only. However, the author announces that the upcoming 0.3.6 release will also run on saner shells such as ksh. This would make it a full-featured alternative blogging engine for (POSIX-conform) nerds.