GitHub Gists

I finally took a few minutes to learn what gists are in GitHub. I understood the basic idea from encountering them all over the web, but I wanted to precisely know what they are.

Here are some essential aspects of gists, as I understand them:

• each gist is a repository, with all that implies:

can be versioned and diff’ed

• can be forked or cloned

• a gist can be public or secret

secret doesn’t mean private; it means not searchable

• however, its URL is discoverable and shareable

• a gist can contain anything text-based, such as:

source code

• Markdown and plain text

• JSON, XML, and CSV data

• Jupyter Notebooks

• GeoJSON files (maps!)

• more info: About gists

My recent motivation for learning to use gists was to embed sample code on this blog, like this:

Pretty convenient and simple!