Well, I didn't know this was going to be as hard as it turned out to be, but sometime yesterday I decided that I didn't really want to manage a backend and GitHub Gists were where my technical thoughts ended up, anyway (and I didn't want to handle embeds, either) so why not just hit up Gists for my tech blog? That way, I'd get syntax highlighted embeds, comments, version management, and more.
As with a lot of technical things, it was much more difficult than I gave it credit for at first, mostly because of embeds and the CORS policy on GitHub Gists.
The first step was to get my GitHub Pages running locally, which I did with this convenient python3 one-liner: python -m http.server 8000. Loading up http://localhost:8000/ gave me a look at my static files. I set up a barebones html file with some script tags for the majority of the logic.
I knew I could access the GitHub Gists through some sort of [API], but I wasn't sure what I got with it. Shouldn't be a problem, right? Sure enough, it was as easy as hi