The trick isn't so much that you need Git, it's that you need some way to trigger Hugo rebuilding your static pages and deploy them to wherever you host the site. And most solutions for doing that are built on Git (sigh).

How are you deploying the static pages currently? SFTP? Something else?

Something like Decap CMS might work. It lets you put a graphical, web-based editor on top of your existing Hugo stack. Web-based editor means you can post from any device with a browser. It's Git-based, but it's a one-time thing; you connect Decap to your Git repository and it takes things from there.

Hugo is a supported backend, and the docs have instructions on how specifically to set up Decap with Hugo.

(Disclaimer: I have used Hugo many times, but have never personally used Decap.)

decapcms.org/

Decap CMS | Open-Source Content Management System

Open source content management for your Git workflow

^decapcms.org

@jalefkowit decap never clicked for me (back when it was Netlify cms).

There’s a new one called Pages CMS which looks promising. Going to try it soon

@skinnylatte I still miss Movable Type, which really hit a sweet spot: nice browser-based content management, but the backend was all about crunching out static files you could host anywhere and that scaled like crazy.

Static publishing these days is pitched exclusively at the turbo nerd market, which is fine if you're a turbo nerd. But most people aren't.

@jalefkowit yep. It’s so much worse in so many ways

People seem to like bear blog

@fishidwardrobe Tried that. I even had my hoster install Hugo.

But it gets complicated when there’s images involved. Also, I want to be able to post from several devices, so git looked like a sane option. Until it didn’t.

Do you need git for hugo? Can't you just edit files in the source dir, have a cronjob run hugo on it every n minutes, and if successful, deploy?

It's moronically simple. Maybe too simple.

@m this doesn’t sound like a great way to handle images.

Also, it’s probably rather clunky from mobile.

Ah, yes. Images.

Maybe writefreely.org/?

@m Right. I had already considered WriteFreely.

But if I’m heading down the path of shonky web applications, I figured I might as well go the whole hog and run WordPress.

@jbiserkov That would solve approximately none of my problems, AND make me reliant on a centralized service owned by Microsoft.

Not at all what I want.