You're right, i've been myself using git, github, keynote, ffmpeg, medium, JS, python, d3 and others to build blog post.

I clearly don't expect people to do that much. I can only do that because i'm coming from web development, and very nice tools started to appear recently.

People in research needs a design framework like a set of templates for keynotes/PPT/JS/CSS (think about how much traction got bootstrap). Distill is doing an awesome jobs at showing the example of what you could do.

Maybe Distill could open-source the templates they use to build those blog post?