David Baldwin has said goodbye to WordPress and started using GitHub as his blog. Go see for yourself:
I love seeing novel uses of git and GitHub and this one especially caught my interest. Having all your blog posts in one versioned repository with all images and code readily available is a cool idea.
I have a habit of changing my blog URL and software a lot and I’ve lost a great many posts over the years. I’m starting to wonder if a few tweaks and features would make this work even better. What about a blog system that uses GitHub for data storage so that you always know where your data is and that you can take it with you? Or a blog system that sucked in content from a GitHub repo and formatted it nicely so that you could post by simply pushing to a GitHub repo? What other ideas are there that could use GitHub and blogging together?
This sounds related to a ticket I opened a while ago for gist feeds: http://logicalawesome.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8570/tickets/764-gist-feeds
Would definitely like to see something like this.
Very cool idea. Impressed.
I’ve been doing this for a while:
http://github.com/elliottcable/blog
I also post it to my normal blog using git:
http://github.com/elliottcable/git-blog
Smart! Now I can fork someone more interesting, get a head start on my renewed blogging.
This is a really neat idea. On the “git as a backend” lines, I do this myself. tekkub.net automatically updates with info for my projects, triggered by a little post-receive webhook from github.
You can check out the code I use to do this if you want: http://github.com/tekkub/tekkub.net/tree/master
To make this idea look more like a blog, GitHub could have an option (different URL or querystring param) to fill the screen with the text of the README, document, post, etc. without the project header and directory file listing.
This would be like a “read only” view that can link back to the regular GitHub project browser view. A querystring param would make it easy to revert back to the regular file listing again by just removing it. Of course a querystring param could result in fuglyish URLs. Another option is to augment the URL, like:
http://github.com/bilson/blog/tree/master/read instead of http://github.com/bilson/blog/tree/master
This could work well for documentation projects that want to use GitHub as a backend. Browsing the documentation in GitHub without the project header or file listing would be much cleaner, and sometimes a better controlled alternative for a backend than using a wiki (or the GitHub project wiki).
@mojombo – Thanks for the mention on this blog. Judging by the comments, it looks like I might not have been the first to think of using Github as a blogging platform. It’s hard to think an original thought these days! Regardless, I am happy to take credit. Ha.
At any rate, it’s a testament to the value that I and others see in GitHub that there is good interest in making this our one-stop-shop window to the world. There are a number of people now watching my blog and I have noticed others setting up blogs in a similar format.
I suspect that we will be using Git and GitHub in ways none of us could have imagined in the next few years. Now if I can just figure out how to get Git or GitHub to cook me dinner!
Best Regards David Baldwin
I use github as my blog storage . My posts are written as flat text files and rendered by my blog engine Shinmun into static pages, which I push to my server with rsync. Comments can be posted via ajax and are rendered into the page by using javascript templates .
To make this idea look more like a blog, GitHub could have an option (different URL or querystring param) to fill the screen with the text of the README, document, post, etc. without the project header and directory file listing.
Bingo, budday. There is far too much space wasted on the project home page. Those awesomely rendered READMEs are practically hidden. The header should be condensed and the file browser removed completely. Give me a “/user/project” URL like that instead of redirecting to the source browser which is kind of a waste of time anyway compared to grabbing the repo and browsing locally.
Hmm, that first paragraph in my last comment there was supposed to be a blockquote. Didn’t realize only some textile is enabled.