Convert Markdown to HTML on git add and never be the wiser.
npm install smudgedown --save
echo "*.html filter=smudgedown" > .gitattributes
Git has a feature set called filters. Filters allow you to smudge a file as you stage it for committing (read: use git add) and clean it as you load the file into your working directory. Smudgeclean uses this feature of git to compile all the .html files from Markdown and into html.
Smudgedown implements very basic templating via .template files. These .template files are used to wrap all their .html siblings. The point .html content is inserted into a .template is signified by a <div class='smudgedown' /> tag. A template should only have one such tag.
mkdir -p node_modules
npm install markdown@0.5.0
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mcwhittemore/smudgedown/master/to-html-clean.js > ./.git/to-html-clean.js
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mcwhittemore/smudgedown/master/to-md-smudge.js > ./.git/to-md-smudge.js
git config filter.smudgedown.clean "node ./.git/to-html-clean.js %f"
git config filter.smudgedown.smudge "node ./.git/to-md-smudge.js %f"
echo "*.html filter=smudgedown" > .gitattributes
If you are setting this up in a new clone of a repo that is already using Smudgeclean make sure to run git reset --hard after you have run the above setup scripts to clean the html into markdown.