Why ZeGiBl?

ZeGiBl (sounds like legible) is a portmanteau of ZeptoJS, Gist, and Blog that was inspired by my work on flasgist several years ago. Flasgist worked great, but it suffered from performance problems because of the server-to-server latency and rate limits in Github's API. ZeGiBl solves these problems by deferring all Github API communication to client-side JavaScript which enables you to deploy a blog without having to deploy any backend web server. ZeGiBl relies on Github Gists for CRUD actions on blog posts and relies on client-side JavaScript to render a list of blog posts and individual blog posts. ZeGiBl uses Github Gists for data storage, zeptojs as a lightweight jquery surrogate, markedjs for parsing markdown, and argjs for parsing URL query arguments.

How does ZeGiBl work?

The list of posts below is generated when the JS in this page reads JSON returned from an HTTP GET request against the Gist API on Github for the user account davidthewatson. A click on any link in the list below simply requests another static HTML page passing the JSON parameters for that Gist as query parameters. The post page simply reads those parameters, loads the markdown for that post, parses it, and renders the page.

What does ZeGiBl look like?

Where can I deploy ZeGiBl?

You can deploy ZeGiBl anywhere you can deploy a static HTML web page. This includes Github Pages, Google Pages, Heroku, your own web server, or a file on your computer.

How do I get started with ZeGiBl

Using a file on your computer

  1. Login to Github or signup for Github if you don't have an account
  2. Goto Github Gists and make sure that you have at least one public gist with a .md or .html extension
  3. Download and unzip the ZeGiBl code
  4. Edit the index.html file and replace davidthewatson with your Github username and save the file
  5. Load the file in your browser. On Mac OS X, this is as simple as open index.html

Your public gists with an .md extension should appear under What Does ZeGiBl look like?. If not, look for any errors in the browser's JavaScript console.

You can now style to suit, or just deploy all of the files in the directory as is to any static web server.

Using Github Pages

Coming Soon!

Fork or clone ZeGiBl.