I like what you've done with the final product and have always thought about doing something similar myself, particularly after I saw what Martin Fenner (https://plus.google.com/106537123721037364937/posts) did with his site at http://blog.martinfenner.org/ which actually allows others to make changes to it via github. Naturally, I'm also highly interested in his take on scholarly communication too, which makes me want to delve in there even more.

Another thing I've been playing around with lately has been some tools/toys at http://indiewebcamp.com primarily within WordPress (I noticed you had one at http://teaching.proftalbert.com/, so you're at least somewhat familiar) though also a bit with http://withknown.com which is a platform built specifically with education in mind (https://withknown.com/education/).

A large part of their philosophy is to own one's own data and then syndicate it out to other social media/external site, but some of their infrastructure allows one to easily make posts on one's own page which then act as replies on another's site. This is particularly interesting from the viewpoint of teaching wherein students and professors can interact with each other, but still have/own all of their individual work. (Incidentally, it also makes for using one's own site as a commonplace book of sorts, which I often find valuable.)

As an exmple, you'll notice on the post on my blog http://boffosocko.com/2015/05/21/category-theory-anyone/ got automatically syndicated to Google+ the other day. Then you replied to it within Google+ but my site sucked your comment back into the comments section on my original blog post, thereby keeping the conversation on my site and not only just on Google's.