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I've built Jekyll+ to handle editing GitHub pages, it may be worth a look; https://github.com/Wiredcraft/jekyllplus#readme

Vapid seems like what I am after, a super simple CMS for "brochure" sites.

Using page templates might allow www.surrealcms.com to manage a blog. Builtin blogging is planned for version 7.1.

Hugo + Netlify is the direction I am going now but that still seems overkill.

I've quickly played with it just now and I can't see how you could use Vapid to create new blog posts. It seems to be a simple dashboard for existing content, but I couldn't figure out how to create new content.

If it supported markdown content as a type I could almost use it.

The docs say it supports Markdown. https://docs.vapid.com/content-types#html