An experiment in running a blog based off Github issues.
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?
- Deploy the app using the Heroku button, set
GITHUB_REPOto the name of the repo you want to use. - Write stuff in Github issues of the
GITHUB_REPOrepo.. - When you're ready to publish an issue as a blog post, you close the issue
and apply the
publishedlabel. - 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. - 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.
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.
- Why not use the Github Wiki as source? The wiki editor does not allow the automatic upload and insertion of assets such as images.