One way I did the same kind of thing was have a standard jekyll template and a single git repo. To start a new site I would copy/rename the template folder and

One way I did the same kind of thing was have a standard jekyll template and a single git repo. To start a new site I would copy/rename the template folder and go to town. Deployment was as easy as rsync or s3sync via a rake command. Super, duper easy and minimal config. At some point I could probably automate the config to a shell script, but it was never used on enough sites for that to matter.