Preview Arbitrary HTML

I'm a big fan of https://gist.github.com/ for sharing code. It's fantastic for quickly putting something online to talk over with someone else. I've often found myself wishing for something that allowed me to share rendered HTML in the same way.

For example, a gist of the HTML for this blog entry can be seen here: https://gist.github.com/jaycfields/82e2cc0a588bd83a91f4. If I want someone to give me feedback on the rendered output, that gist isn't very helpful.

It turns out, it's really easy to see that HTML rendered: switch the file extension to md. Here's the same gist with a md extension: https://gist.github.com/jaycfields/e383b12b6ff9bd49c40a This all works due to the way Github renders markdown gists, and markdown supporting inline HTML.

I wouldn't use this trick to create any data you'd like to have online in the long term, but it's great for sharing short lived HTML.

Sharing Blog Example Code

I've been blogging since 2005, using various tools for publishing readable code. Originally you'd just put code out there, no colors, just a pre tag and some indention. Then 'export to html' became pretty standard in various editors, and everyone's life got better. These days, people want code examples available to play with - and I use GitHub to make that possible.

I've been toying with different formats for sharing code, and my last blog entry demonstrates what I've settled on.

• Each blog entry with a non-trivial amount of code will live in a repository owned by blog-jayfields-com
• Commits will contain working code that can be executed (if possible)
• I'll use gist-it to embed code that can be found in the GitHub repo
• I'll create a gh-pages index.html with the content of the blog entry, for people to review and provide feedback.

Hopefully the extra integration with GitHub will make it easier to try out any code that I publish. As always, please drop me a line in the comments if you have any suggestions.