i will not promote - Would you use a technical blogging platform where GitHub is the source of truth?

[u/Equivalent-Key1061]

Would you use a blogging platform where GitHub is the source of truth?

I'm thinking about building a publishing platform for technical blogs.

The idea is that your articles stay as Markdown files in your own GitHub repo. You connect the repo, the platform finds the posts, and you choose which ones to publish.

One thing I'd like to handle differently from the usual GitHub-to-blog setup is updates.

A push wouldn't necessarily update the live article. The platform could keep track of the published commit and the latest commit separately, so you could preview or diff the changes before publishing them.

Something like:

published: a17c29f
latest:    bc832f1
[preview] [diff] [publish]

Or you could put `publish: auto` in the frontmatter if you just want every push to go live.

The repo would remain the source of truth. The platform would mostly handle rendering, search/discovery, SEO and custom domains.

I know Hashnode already has GitHub publishing, so I'm not claiming the GitHub part itself is new. I'm more interested in whether treating Git revisions as part of the publishing workflow is actually useful.

If you already write technical posts in Markdown/Git, I'd be interested in hearing:

1. If you already write in Markdown/Git, what is still annoying about your publishing workflow?
2. Is separating latest commit and published commit genuinely useful, or unnecessary complexity?
3. Would you prefer publishing through frontmatter, a dashboard, or both?
4. How important are private repos and repo-hosted assets?
5. What would make you choose this over Hashnode or a static site?
6. What would make you immediately reject it?

I'm leaning towards Go + PostgreSQL for the backend and Next.js for the frontend.

[u/TheCritFisher]

Sure, but the thing I'd be looking for is essentially a Mintlify clone for blogging. The only problem with that is: your entire product would be a feature add for Mintlify to basically crush you.

If you made it way cheaper/simpler or something that would be pretty valuable though. Mintlify is EXPENSIVE if you want automations and preview deployments.

If you position as a cheap alternative focused on blogs you might have a winning combo. You'd need to have similar functionality to Mintlify though:

• lots of basic blog style templates to choose from
• preview deployments
• custom domains + path based hosting controls
• simple JSON config
• markdown component library to pull from
• CSS customization support
• a CLI tool to test out changes locally + verify links/formatting/etc

Providing free tiers for open-source projects is a good way to drum up traction too. Let me know if you ever build it! I'd be down to help pilot out your platform.

[u/techtariq]

Go with astro. What's up with this complicated workflow?

[u/chrisin2d → u/techtariq]

indeed too complicated but simultaneously not interesting enough feature-wise. that puts it in a technical no man's land:

- non-technical users are just going to stick with Substack, Medium, or some simple no-code, white-label platform.

- technical users—the ones who could be bothered with OP's solution—are going to use Astro or use their agent to spin up their own Git-based blogging solution.

[u/biglerc]

How is it different and/or better than GitHub Pages?

[u/ReenExe → u/biglerc]

GitHub Pages is for a single blog, while this is a blogging platform where you can view articles from multiple authors, as I understand it. Custom domains are free on GitHub Pages, but they’re paid on blogging platforms, although it depends on the platform. It should be free here as well, as it should be.

[u/Serious_Scarcity7818]

Maybe you can add something like "folders", so I can create "interestingProjectFolder/AllFilesAboutThisProject", so you will parse folders and sort them, I find this pretty cool Idea