So @dwwoelfel and I have been working on a powerful blogging system that keeps all of your data inside of GitHub issues - you can see the result (and post yourself) live on essay.dev - or you can fork the open-source repo and deploy your instance, and all the instructions below will work just fine on your own repo.

Watch me create a blog post from inside magit-forge

GitHub-issue powered blogging and commenting

The entire site is powered by GitHub issues and next.js (and hosted on Vercel). Any issue with a Publish tag will be made publicly available immediately (and can be similarly unpublished by removing the Publish label).

That's pretty fantastic for lots of reasons - your posts are now in an API that's easy to slice and dice so there's no lock-in to your content or comments, it's a familiar place for devs to work, etc.

There are hundreds of features and polish in essay.dev, but importantly for me, it's compatible with emacs' magit-forge!

magit-forge, I choose you!

magit is the famous git control system for emacs, and it has an equally powerful integration to manage GitHub issues called magit-forge.

You can do all the normal CRUD operations on GitHub issues inside a familiar emacs workflow - which means we can do the same for our posts¹!

Creating a post on essay.dev

First make sure you've installed magit and magit-forge (or for spacemacs users, just add the GitHub layer).

Now, let's clone the essay.dev repo:

git clone https://github.com/OneGraph/essay.dev.git
cd essay.dev
emacs README.md

Next we'll connect forge with our GitHub repository via M-x forge-add-repository - and now we're ready to see a list of all of the posts, so run M-x forge-list-issues:

If we hit Enter on any of the issues, we'll see the content and the comments:

Create a new post

Running M-x forge-create-issue will create a new buffer pre-filled via the default new-post template:

Simply fill out the title and the body, and when you're ready, "commit" the new post via C-c C-c. Forge will commit it to a local database first for safe-keeping, and then create an issue on GitHub! Back in the *forge-issue-list...* buffer, hit g to refresh the lists of posts, with your newest one at the top. Hit Enter on it to view the contents.

Your post is ready!

A few seconds later, run M-x forge-pull to update your local copy - you should find there's a new comment waiting for you from onegraph-bot:

That's it, your post is available to the world.

What's a post without comments?

You can also leave comments on your posts (and others) with M-x forge-create-post:

It'll show up instantly on your post (both in forge and on the site):

What's next?

Your content belongs to you, and is easily accessible through the GitHub API - here's an example query that'll pull out the posts for you:

query MyPostsOnGitHub(
  $owner: String = "onegraph"
  $name: String = "essay.dev"
  $createdBy: String = "sgrove"
) {
  gitHub {
    repository(name: $name, owner: $owner) {
      issues(
        first: 10
        orderBy: { field: CREATED_AT, direction: DESC }
        filterBy: { createdBy: $createdBy }
      ) {
        edges {
          node {
            body
            number
            title
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Try it out here

And again, note that this setup will work with any repo, so if you want to self-host your content it's as easy as using the deploy on vercel link.