Need a new maintainer / someone to help?

[davidcelis]

Hey @idan, I've noticed that gistio has been untouched for almost a year now. If you've got other things going on and don't have time to maintain it anymore, I'd really like to offer my help as a committer or co-maintainer. The site's quite cool and I'd hate to see it remain untouched! Please let me know if you think there'd be room for someone to help you out here.

[x3ro]

+1 It would really be a shame for this project to go to waste :+1:

[benforeva]

+1

[hrj]

Looking at the activity history, I think @davidcelis and all interested should just fork and maintain independently.

I hope @idan is also able to get back, but no point in waiting for approval.

[davidcelis]

@hrj The problem is deployment. Sure, people can fork and deploy it somewhere else. Optimally, @idan would give someone commit access and heroku access so that the site can continue to live at the http://gist.io/ domain. Moving it elsewhere is not very discoverable. I asked because people (myself included) like this service and I'd like it to continue to be available for everybody, not just me.

[dexygen]

+1 in general +1 as to the deployment issue

[guilhermesimoes]

I think you should try contacting @idan by email (it's on his profile page).

:+1:

[x3ro]

@GuilhermeSimoes I already tried that road, but he did not answer :frowning:

[guilhermesimoes]

Well, he can't be dead because he shows activity on GitHub.

This is upsetting. Leaving a cool, open-source project to rot like this, while ignoring people's desires to maintain it, is kinda rude.

[jdickey]

@GuilhermeSimoes +1. Life happens; if the guy has to be away for a few weeks/months unexpectedly, people are generally understanding. But if a maintainer loses interest in an active project (and his repo page suggests that ~15 repos have been updated more recently than gistio, then handing it off or at least appointing a co-maintainer is considered good gitiquette.

+1 for a fork, especially one with an interesting name that's discoverable; I just can't think o any such here ATM. @idan, if you get around to reading this thread anytime soon, some clarification/advice would be greatly appreciated.

[davidcelis]

Ahh, has it been two months already? Time sure flies. Anybody tried tweeting at him at @idangazit? I'm going to give that a shot, but... Given the circumstances, maybe in a few days or later.

[idan]

Hi all,

I'm following along, I'm just busy trying to keep an income… incoming. I know that's a shitty excuse for being unresponsive, so first off: my apologies.

I have plans to turn gist.io into something nicer. Switching to server-side rendering/caching is a must if we want to support private gists. Finding a way to hook into a ruby markdown rendering library seems like the only route to proper GFM, and I haven't found time to investigate that yet. There's the notorious requirement that the first file be a markdown-format file, and that's gotta be fixed. I've already made arrangements to license a nicer typeface for gist.io, which should make everything that much nicer.I also want to add a few other features that would allow github users to treat gist.io like a blogging platform. The latter bits, I'd like to charge a very nominal amount of money for, to offset the dyno hours / fixed costs of running gistio in the cloud. Given that the project is open-source, payment via accepted patches sounds like a fair deal to me—pay with money, or pay with patches.

Regardless, the plan right now is for gistio to remain open-source. LIke others have mentioned in the thread—there's nothing stopping you from running your own instance, but I control the one on gist.io, and unfortunately that means waiting until I have the time to deal with it.

So, no—at this time, I'm not going to appoint a maintainer. I'm sorry, but that's just the way I'd like this project to go. Keep in mind that I threw gist.io up after an evening of hacking, and it's the quintessential MVP. The fact that so many people use it is amazing—and I promise not to let it languish for much longer.

<3. I'll try to be more communicative about progress from now on.

On Sunday, August 11, 2013 at 9:20 AM, David Celis wrote:

Ahh, has it been two months already? Time sure flies. Anybody tried tweeting at him at @idangazit (http://twitter.com/idangazit)? I'm going to give that a shot, but... Given the circumstances, maybe in a few days or later.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub (https://github.com/idan/gistio/issues/55#issuecomment-22453208).

[davidcelis]

Hey thanks for getting back to us on this, Idan. Sorry to see that you won't add others as committers, but that's understandable given you have some concrete plans for the site. Out of curiosity, what part of gist.io costs money to run on Heroku? Is it traffic, or does some functionality of the site rely on additional services?

[idan]

@davidcelis there are a few additional (non-free) services that will be needed to realize my plans, and just so I'm not misunderstood—this isn't a not-for-profit, I'd like to see if gistio is useful enough to enough people to bring in a little side income, and in a larger sense, experiment with open-source business.

I just pushed a bunch of fixes for longstanding requests—GFM rendering, multiple gistfiles, a fix for the infamous "must be markdown" annoyance. More coming.

[henrahmagix]

@idan Thanks for explaining =) I think it would be nice to reference this issue or paste your reply into a README.md to show on the home page. I only found this by looking through all the issues and finding a reference. Without it I was assuming your latest commits were a summer burst of updates before another year off from Gist.io. I think it would be great to inform others of this, so they know you don't intend to let it languish =)

[dexygen]

@henrahmagix I for one remain cynical and until proven otherwise will assume that "latest commits were (indeed) a summer burst of updates before another year off from Gist.io". I think those still interested in a fork with a) multiple maintainers and b) maintaining a free service at a new address, should talk amongst themselves. I for one don't at all like the giant size of the title and that actual content doesn't start until nearly half way down the page.

[idan]

@henrahmagix Good idea, will add such a note.

@dexygen Given the fact that you (and others) care about the service, I think that I have something worth investing time in, and turning into something commercial. I've already spent some money to make it so, and I hope you'll decide to stick around while I make it into a more useful, more beautiful service.

As for forking and running your own copy, that's entirely your perogative—I'm doing my best to be more communicative now that I'd like to actually turn this experiment into a product.

[henrahmagix]

@dexygen Good points; I think a community fork would be great, because I'd love to participate in something like this. Roughdraft and webwriter offer interesting ideas for a community driven Gist project =)

However I was just talking about better communicating the direction and status of Gist.io to everyone, since @idan's taken the time to write about it, and I quite like the ideas already laid out. Thank's @idan!

Edit: by community driven, I mean more than one maintainer. But obviously there are the hurdles of determining a single vision with multiple owners =)

[x3ro]

@henrahmagix Thanks for the link to Roughdraft.

@dexygen I already thought about hosting a community fork, but I lack the idea for a nice, short, descriptive domain name, which I think is key for the fork to be successful :smile: