Each gist acts as an individual post, supporting Markdown for formatting, code snippets, and comments, without the need for a full blog. Gists are version-controlled, making edits and revisions transparent, and they are easily shareable via direct URLs. This approach keeps hosting lightweight, leverages GitHub's infrastructure, providing a low-maintenance way to maintain a minimal, code-friendly blog.
I am certainly not the first one to think of doing this (see for example https://github.com/seajoshc/gistblog), but what I'm doing is a bit more radical: I'll just leave gists as such, without making them part of my website.