Can you blog in github?

I’ve written quite a lot in my life. Some of it has ended up in blogs (now since gone, although I have archive copies), alas most not. Mostly what I write is targeted towards a small audience — customers, co-workers, friends. For those venues a blog isn’t actually the best way (customers like .doc files, for co-workers email or intranet work just fine, and Facebook and Twitter are great for friends). Yet, sometimes I have a mysterious urge to spill my guts to the wider world.

I added a blog to wordpress.com some time earlier, then pulled its plug without actually writing anything meaningful in there. Somehow I felt a whole blog site, where I’d worry over presentation (I’m a stickler for good design) over the content was somehow.. unsatisfactory. Yet I’d definitely not want to host anything myself, either.

While this was swirling around my head (in a background process), I thought about github. It is public. It can natively render restructuredtext files natively to HTML — perhaps not so pretty, but what the hell. Thanks got git itself, all of the data would be version-controlled and securely replicated. Would that work?

So that’s what I’m now trying to check out. Could I use github itself to host a blog, with minimal maintenance and effort?

I do see already some problems. How would you do a nice RSS feed? How would I do linking between posts easy? And of course, how would I handle comments?

I’m not sure. I’ll find out soon enough.