gist.io

There’s a scale of permanence to writing on the web. On one end, we have the tweet: brief and ephemeral. On the other end of the scale, we have longform blog writing: unlimited in length and hopefully impervious to the passage of time.

Sometimes, we want to share a bit of writing that is neither. Maybe we want to write for a specific audience, but don’t want to address the people who usually read our blogs. Maybe it’s just something that doesn’t fit into 140 characters.

Gist.io is a solution for that, inspired by Mike Bostock’s delightful bl.ocks.org

Displays the text of a gist with nice formatting. To use it:

1. Create a gist on GitHub with a single Markdown-syntax file.
2. In the URL bar, replace
   **gist.github.com/youruser**/abc123… with
   **gist.io/@youruser**/abc123….
3. Enjoy your beautifully-presented writing.

An example usage is this version of a speech by Richard Hamming (see Richard Hamming)