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GitHub's wiki makes a pretty decent blogging platform

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Jeff Schnitzer edited this page Sep 11, 2023 · 2 revisions

March 12, 2017

I've been thinking about blogging again, but I'm put off by all the existing blog platforms. What I really want seems to be a GitHub wiki:

  • Edit in Markdown. It's the same github-flavored markdown I use for development, which is pretty much the only wiki syntax I can remember these days.

  • Easy asset management. Instead of posting images to flickr (or wherever) and linking them externally, I can commit images to the wiki repo.

  • Easy code snippets. Not only can I easily include language-specific hilighted code snippets in my posts, I can easily link to larger full code examples by checking them into the regular repository as assets.

  • Natural for my "audience". I write mostly about code. Anyone interested is probably already using Github.

  • More organization and presentation choices. Blog software tends to force a linear presentation. I'd like to be able to have "collections" of articles and introduce them with freeform commentary. A random list of tags is not adequate.

  • Better cross-linking. Digging up URLs to older blog entries is a PITA. Wikis self-link naturally.

  • Permanence. Posterous died. Livejournal zombified. Tumblr's fate is joined with Yahoo. Medium hasn't figured out a business plan. Blogger is a loss leader for Google. Wordpress is... yuck. I'd like my content to survive 10, 20 years or more. GitHub's wikis are important to their profitable line of business, which isn't blogging.

There are a few downsides I can see:

  • The "natural" link to my blog (https://github.com/stickfigure/blog) actually goes to the main repository, where a README file offers a link to https://github.com/stickfigure/blog/wiki. So there's likely an extra click if someone tries to find my blog's home page. Techies can deal.

    • Update - the README is now the same list of entries that's on the wiki home page. So no extra click.

  • GitHub doesn't notify project followers of wiki changes. That's too bad; totally aside from blogging, I would like to be able to get notifications of documentation changes in some of the projects I follow. But I'm skeptical of the value of blog platforms' builtin discovery features anyways. Who still reads their Tumblr dashboard? I get links from Hacker News, email, Facebook, and (sometimes) Google+. Link discovery seems to be a fad-of-the-month phenomenon anyways; content just needs a stable permanent home.

    • Update - since I'm now keeping the README updated with links to new posts, watching the main blog repo will notify you of new content.

  • There's no discussion board. I may be fine with this; after a few weeks most comments tend to be spam anyways. For in-the-moment discussion I like linking to HN.

  • No personal domain. I have mixed feelings about this. The downside of using a personal domain is that content dies when the domain does. If you dream that your content will survive your death, it's probably best to stick with something that doesn't require a valid credit card.

Some of these concerns would be solved by using github pages and Jekyll, but that seems excessively complicated. I don't need templates or themes and I don't want to install software. Just editing a wiki page is ideal.

I've moved over some old content and I'm going to try this out.

Me

Hi, my name is Jeff. I've been the CTO of companies large and small, but mostly I like to write code.

If you want to be notified of blog updates, follow the repository.

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