I found Textile: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textile_(markup_language)

Specifically, the pytextile tool: http://code.google.com/p/pytextile/

Like in your case, I still felt that I needed a processing script and build step to make the most complete web pages.

But in terms of input, the Textile format is pretty trivial; the most common page elements are reduced to one or two prefix characters most of the time, e.g. a list bullet is a “*”, a heading might be “h1.”. And raw HTML can be directly embedded for corner cases.

The other neat thing about the language is that it interprets intent pretty well, e.g. if you were to type “2 x 3″, it would assume that the “x” should become the Unicode multiplication sign in the HTML output; similarly, it handles curly quotes and other conversions implicitly from a raw ASCII line.