Pages from Gists
What do bl.ocks.org, draft.sx, gistlog.co, and roughdraft.io have in common? In fact, they share more than one feature, but there are two salient ones. First, they all provide a means of displaying a “gist” in an attractive, single-page format. Actually, make that provided, because the second feature they share is that they’re all defunct.
In my experience, one of the earliest of these services was gist.io which,1 somewhere around 2018, briefly disappeared. That was a shame, because it was a very nifty way of sharing writing on the web. Fortunately, it came back to life and seems to be a stable (and welcome!) service to this day.
Another option is to publish a “Simplenote” to the web, but in my experience, that can sometimes be glitchy. Some notes simply refuse to “publish”. Why? No idea.
However, I’ve recently discovered another such service: nicegist.github.io. And it does what it says on the tin! or in the URL, anyway. Let’s hope it lasts longer than some in my opening paragraph!
It’s well worth having both these services (or even more), as they do their jobs slightly differently, and their authors have made different aesthetic judgments.
gist.io |
nicegist |
|---|---|
| Brighter! Bigger! | More restrained layout. |
| Body font is serif: Elana | Body font is sans-serif: Roboto |
| Title for page must be embedded in the gist. | Title for the page is the “title” for the gist. |
And other, subtle differences, too. But they’re very handy tools for certain purposes.
Since finding BearBlog, though, I wonder if I’ll be making use of the gist-as-webpage services so much. It is a slightly different kind of publishing, though — only time will tell!
And my memory is mistaken, for Idan Gazit (gist.io’s creator) credits
bl.ocks.orgwith inspiration for his service.↩