I am thinking of using Jekyll as the blogging engine for an upcoming project. However, I need a small part of the website to be dynamic, using some sort of sever-side language (Ruby, PHP, Node.js, etc.)
I want the posts to be static as you would expect from Jekyll, however at the bottom of the page I have a piece of content that needs to rotate randomly on each page load. I don't want to use JavaScript to do this.
Is this possible within Jekyll?
No, Jekyll only creates static pages. You'll have to use JavaScript for any dynamic content.
If you don't want to use javascript at all, you can put the dynamic content on a different server and then embed it in your jekyll site using an iframe.
You can use server side includes. You might need to configure the server or change the extension of the generated files to .shtml.
Jekyll should generate this where you need to insert dynamic content:
<!--#include virtual="dynamic.rb" -->
dynamic.rb should produce valid html to display.