For people who didn't understand what this is doing - it's using client-side JS to load the markdown files from GitHub, compiling it to HTML and displaying it on the browser.
Looks like the advantage of this is that it's a one-time setup - you don't need to build the files every time you commit, you can add your markdown files on GitHub and it automatically gets 'added' to your blog.
The downside of this is that this makes RSS feeds impossible, and non-JS users will suffer.
Is this a big advantage? I write an article in markdown and push to my server. The server’s post-commit hook automatically runs a static site generator. It takes less than a second to run each time. It took me half an hour to set this up[1], https included.
Importantly, since it’s a static site with no client side JS, it’s faster and better for SEO. Anecdotal evidence - my blog is a featured snippet from google for a couple of tech related queries. This wasn’t the case earlier when my blog was generated by ghost.
To reiterate my use case:
- no maintenance: the site is served from github, so dont have to maintain/pay for a server
- deduplication of work: dont have to write/sync a blog post and a project README for a given project.
Regarding SEO, since all content in on github, a search engine might index github content and make it discoverable that way.
Ghost doesnt require any clientside JS of any kind, it's totally user choice if/when they want to have that. Yesterday I built a Ghost theme with 2.5kb page size, and average pageload of 100ms. Super easy :)
The same content with the same URLs is ranked higher by Google after the switch, suggesting that Google prefers this.
We exist! Speaking for myself, it's a speed and privacy thing.
> I feel like no non technical user disables javascript and
> the few who do can enable it again if required.
Generally I'm not going to enable JS just to use your blog, especially as doing so usually allows a tonne of tracking scripts to run.
Also there is something extremely backwards about forcing every user to translate your content rather than you doing this and serving it statically. Think about the collective energy wastage if every website did this.
So https://captnemo.in/ideas/ loads the README from https://github.com/captn3m0/ideas.
If you'd like to replicate, use this layout[0], and create a post with just a few bits of frontmatter[1]
The obvious advantage is that I can now serve READMEs for various projects within my website, without having to worry about updating it in any way. The READMEs stay in their respective projects. Its all done client side though, so not recommended if you'd like to use the page on your website as the primary. The one issue is that internal links in markdown don't work easily.
[0]: https://github.com/captn3m0/captn3m0.github.com/blob/master/...
[1]: https://github.com/captn3m0/captn3m0.github.com/blob/master/...
This is similar to what some big companies do to render a projects page. A copied Twitter's[1][2] a while back when it was simpler[3][4].
[1] https://twitter.github.io/
[2] https://github.com/twitter/twitter.github.io
