A better implementation would be: render all the markdown files in the repository and map README.md to index.html. Now you can create your own file structure, have your images with the article, and optionally add them to the RSS feed by adding a `published_at` in the frontmatter. Or even better use the git history to find out when it was added (and changed) in the repo. You get all the "admin" and rendering for free from GitHub.
I guess my point is that there is a lot of friction inherent to Jekyll's blog post publishing system. Since I adopted that other approach it's much easier for me. I love to only focus on the text and not worry about the rendering. And be able to edit it with my favourite text editor.
You can have the best of both worlds though. You can use gulp.js to build Jekyll friendly files coming from Ghost using the Ghost Content API: https://david.darn.es/tutorial/2019/08/11/use-ghost-with-jek...
It's extremely minimal, but I found that it's perfect for my needs. Sample blog: https://rwtxt.com/kevinfiol
That's why i finally settled for a Flat File CMS [1], in my case Grav [2]. Like with hugo you get total control. And with most of them you get a single web interface to administrate the site, manage extensions and write blog entries. And you still have the possibility to git push everything on the dev server and git pull on prod, without managing a database. It's a dream.
They are not without problems though. You need to host your php site somewhere. Sometimes it's necessary to dive into php to fix some problems and creating something unique still takes some web skills (in contrary to wordpress for example).
We used to have that with MovableType and (less known) Bricolage.
Today there is Lektor (does it support Python 3?) and that's about it.
https://ghost.org/docs/api/v2/gatsby/
> Of course I'd like a static website for deploying, but I'd love a web gui which acts as a frontend for such generators.
If you want such a gui on your local machine you're not much more than a few commands away
npm i -g ghost-cli
ghost install local
I think that when you want to write, you shouldn't need to mess up with tech details of your system. It's distracting. Of course I'd like a static website for deploying, but I'd love a web gui which acts as a frontend for such generators. I think that Prose was something similar but I found it buggy/not updated, while another saas I tried(Forestry, I think?) was good but you couldn't customize everything.
Ghost is my ultimate choice until an official, core-developers supported web gui is created for jekyll, hugo, or whatever static generator lies out there.