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Would grabbing the first header work for you? For the introductory post that would be perfect. http://www.mkdown.com/8485599

This seems like a good option for most gists, but for parent's specific use case it would just say "Primary course".

(This seems like more of a problem with the specific gist rather than with your idea.)

I was going to say the same thing. Something about the typography on mkdown is more visually appealing.

I much prefer mkdown's styling, but I think the initial fade-in is unnecessary.

"Learning Haskell" is filled in the description of the gist. Descriptions can be fairly lengthy and not always suitable as titles. However, I think it would be awesome to support metadata in a form like in Jekyll posts or something similar.