I, too, settled on a minimalist process for deploying my blog, just build it with a Hugo, copy the files over to a cheap server, and there you go, deployed. It's the right tool for the job (for me).
I thought about that process, too, but it’s more convenient to skip the whole “lots of commits” and GHA loop.
At the moment I’m still mainly fixing and customizing the theme, but I expect that once I actually start blogging instead of fixing the theme and learning Hugo, GitHub actions would make sense again.
> I, too, settled on a minimalist process for deploying my blog, just build it with a Hugo, copy the files over to a cheap server, and there you go, deployed.
Meh. That's over-engineered[1] /s :-)
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[1] I have a bash script that produces the site from markdown snippets, commits it to a repo and the VPS pulls master periodically.