Abusing the 404 error page

Update: This actually isn’t accurate anymore as I switched to Middleman for developing this site, abandoning the hackiness described below.

GitHub lets you put up a custom 404 page for custom domains. I had this idea that you could use the 404 page as your main layout and then use the path displayed in the browser’s address bar to dynamically fetch content.

That’s what I’m doing here. See how the address bar says ‘abusing-404’? There’s JavaScript on this page that takes that (from window.location.pathname), fetches abusing-404.md with an XMLHttpRequest, and then uses markdown-js marked to render the response as HTML.