GitHub gists provide a simple way to share code snippets with others. Every gist is a Git repository, which means that it can be forked, cloned and — most importantly for us — edited separately from any web page where it is being displayed. We want to be able to run a line of javascript (provided by GitHub) in an article that would display a gist file as an embedded item. An example of this can be found here: https://github.blog/2008-07-24-embedded-gists/.