First, I create a Git repository some place on the server. This is the Git repo that's going to be populated with your content, but it doesn't have to be in a world-viewable location on your server. Instead, you can place this anywhere, and then use a Git hook or a cronjob to copy files from it to a world-viewable directory. I don't cover that here. I refer to this location as the staging directory.

Next, create a bare repository on your server. In its hooks directory, create a shell script called post-receive:

#!/usr/bin/bash
#
while read oldrev newrev refname
do
       BR=`git rev-parse --symbolic --abbrev-ref $refname`
       if [ "$BR" == "master" ]; then
               WEB_DIR="/my/staging/dir"
               export GIT_DIR="$WEB_DIR/.git"
               pushd $WEB_DIR > /dev/null
               git pull
               popd > /dev/null
       fi
done 

Now when you push to your bare repository, you are triggering the post-receive script to run, which in turn triggers a git pull in your staging directory.

Once your staging directory contains the content you want to distribute, you can copy them to live directories, or you could make your staging directory live (remember to exclude the .git directory though), or whatever you want.

For gopher, I create a file listing by date using a shell script:

#!/usr/bin/bash
SED=/usr/bin/sed
DIR_BASE=/my/live/dir
DIR_LIVE=blog
DIR_STAGING=staging
DATE=${DATE:-`date --rfc-3339=date`}
for POST in `find "$DIR_BASE"/"$DIR_STAGING" \
-type f -name "item.md" -exec grep -Hl "$DATE" {} \;`;
do 
POSTDIR=`dirname "$POST"`
cp "$POST" "$DIR_BASE"/"$DIR_LIVE"/`basename $POSTDIR`.txt
echo -e 0Latest'\t'../"$DIR_LIVE"/`basename $POSTDIR`.txt > /tmp/updater.tmp

echo -e 0"$DATE" `basename $POSTDIR`'\t'../"$DIR_LIVE"/`basename $POSTDIR`.txt \
>> /tmp/updater.tmp
"${SED}" -i "/0Latest/ r /tmp/updater.tmp" "$DIR_BASE"/date/gophermap
"${SED}" -i '0,/0Latest/{/0Latest/d;}' "$DIR_BASE"/date/gophermap
/usr/bin/rm /tmp/updater.tmp
done