I have no voice and I must scream

[DamonOehlman]

I am frustrated with current blogging offerrings. I am a developer, and I love code. I have had blogs on hosted Wordpress, self-hosted Wordpress, Tumblr and also statically generated sites using both Jekyll and Hyde. While each of those solutions worked well to a certain extent, I felt frustrated by various aspects of all of them.

Right now I am in the situation where I have moved away from doing a lot of Python development, and pretty much use Javascript exclusively on both the server side and client. As such, my python environment is in a bit of a state, and my current blog has a barrier to entry to post to.

I've considered various Node.js based static site generators (such as DocPad) but to be honest it is just too much hard work to consider moving all my old posts across from Hyde to DocPad. Then if I do, what happens if I find a generator I like more than DocPad? Will I have the time or energy to convert posts across?

Probably not. So you see I have an issue.

And in my issue lies the solution I believe. Generally when I feel compelled to write a post, it is because I have something that needs to be reported, an issue as it were. What better place to record my thoughts and requirements in my personal repository space on Github? Heck I trust them with my code, I think I can trust them with my content.

Well it's decided then - I'm going to blog via github issues. For the moment posts will be shared through the github interface, but thanks to Github's wonderful api I'll be writing both a static generator and dynamic frontend for viewing these through damonoehlman.github.com soon enough.

[DamonOehlman]

It should be noted, that the phrase "I have no voice and must scream" comes from a [video game](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Scream_(video_game)

[davebalmer]

Interesting... Added benefit, at least in my mind, is excellent markdown support... :)

[DamonOehlman]

My thoughts too, although I was thinking I would have to do some good work with a custom front end to make code highlighting work as well as it does in github proper. Heck maybe I won't write the front end for issues, just a headline which links over here.

[josegonzalez]

By video game, you mean book.

[DamonOehlman]

Um, yes, that's exactly what I meant.... thanks for the clarification :)

[dkristian]

I vaguelly remember someone doing something similar with github before, but not though the issues interface. Unfortunately I can't find a reference to it any more (but it wasn't http://pages.github.com/). I'll be following with interest.

[DamonOehlman]

I thought someone had too (from memory it's quite a popular "site"). I think they used to post an article in markdown format and then use comments on the commit. Given how infrequently I get a post right first time I think this probably wouldn't suit me as there would probably be a number of separate comment threads depending on the commit. That is assuming there was engagement at all...

[dkristian]

Ok, so something I don't like as a follower so far is that all comments show up in the RSS feed as separate items, and there doesn't appear to be a way to disable it. Not a big deal, but I prefer to opt-in to comment notifications for individual posts.