Yesterday I launched this gistblog and open sourced the code so that anyone could host their own.
It is very simple right now. I want to keep it simple, but here are the things I am planning on adding to gistblog in the near future:
- drafts. right now you can only save posts by publishing them
- editing posts (this is possible since gists are editable and have git history)
- custom post slugs (like 2013/07/16/gistblog-features-i-want)
- caching posts with Redis to avoid slamming the Github api (this is already done, though in a simple way)
- cache invalidation if the post is edited so the readers never see an outdated version
- a better composer view. right now it is just a giant textbox for entering markdown with a preview div underneath showing a live-rendered preview of what is in the box. however, I have to constantly scroll down to see it. having a side-by-side view somehow would be nice
- some helper buttons in the compose view for inserting links/images/etc
- social buttons? maybe... i don't want clutter, but maybe this can be done tastefully
gistblog was written to be multi-tenant capable - meaning that one could host this online somewhere like awesomegistblogs.com and have multiple authors be able to login and write posts, however right now it is easiest to host your own using Heroku and configuring the correct env variables. I don't think I plan on hosting a multi-tenant version, but maybe someone else likes this idea?
What other simple features might be interesting for this project?
Happy Happy Joy Joy!
