how to name your github gists

yes, this is a bit of a hack

I started using Gists to encapsulate all of my code, command line, and log related content rather than using <pre> tags or some styling tool to format code inline. I found that using Gists cleaned up the source of my blog considerably, and made it easier to edit content in general; converting to an HTML escaped version and then having to make changes afterwards was a pain at times

That said, I ran into a different pain, which was Gist's bizarre way of handling organization of data sets

description? check. name? well...

Gists to allow you to set a description for a set of files, which can help you identify what it is that's in there from a list of all your gists. However, it also organizes them from the alphabetically first file name in the set. If you had, for example, a bunch of Maven examples all with a file in the set called 'pom.xml', you'd have a hard time navigating your list of Gists. It also shows the contents of that file in the list, further confusing you.

However, that identification system can be used to your advantage if you're clever. If you create another file in your Gist which is actually a name for the set, but precede that name with a single space, it will be sorted to the top alphabetically. You can't have empty files though, so my advice would be to actually add your description there instead. As an example of how this looks, take a look at my Gists and how they're labeled.

how can that file be excluded when using gists remotely?

Gists offer a script tag based solution for embedding a Gist elsewhere. For example:

<script src="https://gist.github.com/theotherian/5954592.js"></script>

would embed all the files contained in the Gist at https://gist.github.com/theotherian/5954592.js

But what if you just want to embed an individual file, in this case the togglewifi.applescript file? In this case you can append ?file=filename to the URL:

<script src="https://gist.github.com/theotherian/5954592.js?file=togglewifi.applescript"></script>

The end result is this: