Hacker News Reader

Comment by swanson | Hacker News Reader

Inside a Jekyll repo on Github:

    New file button = New Post (rich editor)
    Branch and new file = Draft
    Edit button (owner) = Edit
    Edit button (reader) = Submit correction
    Pull request = Submit Guest post
    Pull request comment = Copy/content editor
    Issues = Idea/Suggestion bucket
    Commit button = Publish and deploy

If there was a way to do the live markdown preview using the css (maybe you could inline link it?), then you have a pretty complete blog engine for hackers. This would be an awesome feature IMO.

Github would then be the place where you put your code, write your blog, track your issues, paste snippets for IRC (Gist), display your business card (profile info), and host your talk slides (SpeakerDeck). The next logical step to me would be integrating conferences/user groups (ala Lanyard/Meetup.com).

PS. @github feel free to hire me to help build it out :P

View on HN

I love this idea for Github and think it would be a really exciting move for them! One thought though - could the Git protocol† for editing, correcting, guest posts etc not also work well as a more general protocol for hacker bloggers?

Something like a meta tag on the index page for the blog, pointing to the git repository‡? (be it on Github, Bitbucket, or your own server) A simple command-line tool (or browser extension) would assist in checking out the repository, and you could issue the pull request with whatever communication protocols you have in common (no need to re-invent the wheel here).

† It needn't just be for git, of course - it could work with many (any?) distributed version control systems (Mercurial and Bazar spring to mind)

‡ I realise you may not necessarily want everyone to have access (even read-only) to your repository - for example, you may have future, draft posts in un-merged branches. The beauty of distributed version control is that there's no canonical server - so there's no reason the public one has to have any branch pushed to it other than master.

There's a "rel=vcs-*" microformat :

http://joeyh.name/rfc/rel-vcs/

Have you seen Prose? http://prose.io/about.html

Yep - it's the same concept. But native support on Github would be cooler IMO :)

And I believe it has the same issue with live preview not using your own CSS

There's a /raw endpoint that accepts markdown and renders it - the GitHub for Windows client uses it. Maybe you could use that with some javascript?

> If there was a way to do the live markdown preview using the css

Render in an iframe with the right CSS linked?

There are several ways; but I might ways using the current Github UI.

How about a browser extension?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com