ebarnouflant

An experiment in running a blog based off Github issues.

Why ?

I usually use octopress to write blog posts, but it's a bit of a pain to quickly preview stuff, commit a new article, or upload images.

Github issues have all that functionality already present, and I like the writing process there.

So I figured, why not write blog posts as Github issues, and have a small blog engine take the content from there?

How it works

1. Deploy the app using the Heroku button, set GITHUB_REPO to the name of the repo you want to use.
2. Write stuff in Github issues of the GITHUB_REPO repo..
3. When you're ready to publish an issue as a blog post, you close the issue and apply the published label.
4. Blog entries are cached for 15 minutes, and the markdown content is cached based on the SHA digest of the issue's body. If you need to force a refresh sooner, just force-refresh the page in your browser (i.e. send Cache-Control: no-cache). Force-refresh requests are throttled so that you can force-refresh at most every 15 seconds.
5. Your visitors can comment on the corresponding Github issue.

Note: We force the application of a specific label since anyone can create issues, and you don't want people being able to publish anything on your website.

Options

You should probably register a Github application to increase the API rate-limit (defaults to 60 req/s for anonymous requests): https://github.com/settings/applications. Then, set GITHUB_CLIENT_ID and GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET.

For the list of supported options, please see the app_config.rb initializer.

FAQ

• Why not use the Github Wiki as source? The wiki editor does not allow the automatic upload and insertion of assets such as images.