Using Gitbook as a blogging tool
Gitbook is normally used to collaborate on and publish books. I'm using it to publish this blog.
I had originally decided to manage my blog using github pages, because I appreciate version control, being able to work offline, and being able to get a site up an running quickly and for free.
When I was looking for a good jekyll theme to use two stood out to me in particular, in spite of being relatively ugly to look at:
I liked them because they don't arrange the pages you upload chronologically, but instead let you organise them hierarchically. At this point I realised that the kind of blog I like to read (and the kind that I'd like to write) isn't really a blog in the traditional sense, but is rather just a collection essays organised for others to read. The kind of blog I wanted wouldn't really privilege more recent posts over older ones, and might even contain several half finished posts which were all concurrent works in progress.
With this in mind, I decided that I'd much rather organise my blog like a manual page or a book - with "chapters" and "subchapters" representing topics and projects that I'm currently working on. I remembered that the Redux docs were some particularly stylish manual pages and came across Gitbook by looking up how they were made.
Even though Gitbook seems to be primarily built around writing books or manual pages (the clue's in the name!), the tools it provides also seem perfect for the kind of blogging I've been wanting to do.
In particular it looks like they've put a lot of work into making it pleasant to write chapters (blog posts) while still giving you a lot of control over the content and format of your book (blog). This includes all my favourite parts of github pages. You write your posts in markdown, can edit pages online and offline, and all your work is stored in a version controlled repository.
You can check out how I've set up this book by browsing its gitbook repo.
One minor change I have included has been to add the following CSS to the file: website/styles.css
.summary > li:first-child{
display: none;
}
Which removes the link at the top of your "book" that navigates back to the gitbook repo it is hosted on. As far as I can tell this is mostly a feature for readers to suggest changes and download it as a PDF. I felt like neither of these features were necessary for a blog.
If you're reading this and currently write a blog, or are thinking of starting one up - I highly encourage you to spend some time, like I did, thinking about what blog-format is best suited to your style of writing. I think chronologically-ordered blogs certainly have their merits, but I often come across blogs that would be much easier to navigate (and much more fun to read) if they were arranged some other way.
[I will add more tips and advice here as I customise my blog further]