5 ms·

Ask HN: Does anyone use Git as their blog?

2 points by jka 5y ago

Not markdown or blog posts within a git repository, no; much simpler: empty commits with commit messages as the 'blog posts' themsleves. (vaguely like a .plan file, spiritually)

Minor49er 5y ago
Why use this over other options? Web based blogging software offers more features such as the ability to hyperlink or to embed media. Or for a minimal approach, the blog could simply be a folder of text files since the files would be easy to view and edit with a variety of software while the filesystem would handle tracking the file's creation date
- jka 5y ago
  Well, it could enable a few things: - Fetching the latest updates from a network of your peers selectively, a bit like RSS feeds - Merging histories from your peer network into a linear format (straightforward since there shouldn't be any merge conflicts between empty commits) - Construction of branches arranged by topic by cherry-picking relevant commits - Bisection of content would be available in order to navigate conversation history Also it'd federate fairly naturally, and is quite network-safe because it'd only require the presence of hosted git repositories (in other words: few network services and installation dependencies required). Only an idea - wrangling and herding the commits could be the tricky part, in practice (the per-topic branches in particular are a half-baked idea).
  - Minor49er 5y ago
    For your first points, why not just use RSS feeds? Otherwise many blogging platforms support multiple authors for a single blog and categories/tagging which can also achieve something similar
    - jka 5y ago
      Well, in comparison to RSS: git's fairly good at negotiating and transferring a subset of relevant commits over the wire, whereas RSS feeds (naively, as I understand it, and without really considering ETags or other magic) tend to be rendered server-side as a list of posts, regardless of whether client(s) are already up-to-date on the latest content.
      - Minor49er 5y ago
        Some RSS feed generators have ways to filter posts on whichever criteria is allowed (category, tags, etc). Some sites will even provide these separately. Couldn't a client pull these all of these together and combine them to achieve the same sort of thing, or even perform filtering itself?

2 points by jka 5y ago

Not markdown or blog posts within a git repository, no; much simpler: empty commits with commit messages as the 'blog posts' themsleves. (vaguely like a .plan file, spiritually)

Minor49er 5y ago

Why use this over other options? Web based blogging software offers more features such as the ability to hyperlink or to embed media. Or for a minimal approach, the blog could simply be a folder of text files since the files would be easy to view and edit with a variety of software while the filesystem would handle tracking the file's creation date

jka 5y ago
Well, it could enable a few things: - Fetching the latest updates from a network of your peers selectively, a bit like RSS feeds - Merging histories from your peer network into a linear format (straightforward since there shouldn't be any merge conflicts between empty commits) - Construction of branches arranged by topic by cherry-picking relevant commits - Bisection of content would be available in order to navigate conversation history Also it'd federate fairly naturally, and is quite network-safe because it'd only require the presence of hosted git repositories (in other words: few network services and installation dependencies required). Only an idea - wrangling and herding the commits could be the tricky part, in practice (the per-topic branches in particular are a half-baked idea).
- Minor49er 5y ago
  For your first points, why not just use RSS feeds? Otherwise many blogging platforms support multiple authors for a single blog and categories/tagging which can also achieve something similar
  - jka 5y ago
    Well, in comparison to RSS: git's fairly good at negotiating and transferring a subset of relevant commits over the wire, whereas RSS feeds (naively, as I understand it, and without really considering ETags or other magic) tend to be rendered server-side as a list of posts, regardless of whether client(s) are already up-to-date on the latest content.
    - Minor49er 5y ago
      Some RSS feed generators have ways to filter posts on whichever criteria is allowed (category, tags, etc). Some sites will even provide these separately. Couldn't a client pull these all of these together and combine them to achieve the same sort of thing, or even perform filtering itself?