// the find
benbalter/word_diff
Word Diff empowers you to be a Markdown person in a Microsoft Word world by automatically converting any Word document committed to a GitHub repo to Markdown
A Sinatra webhook server that listens for GitHub push events and automatically commits a Markdown version of any .docx file alongside the original. Useful if you're stuck collaborating with Word users but want diffable text in your repo.
The auto-commit-on-push model is clean — you commit the .docx and the Markdown appears without any extra steps. Preserves commit authorship and message, so the history stays coherent. Builds on word-to-markdown which handles the actual conversion complexity. Small, focused codebase — easy to read and understand the whole thing.
Last commit in 2022, Travis CI for builds (effectively dead), Heroku setup instructions using buildpacks that no longer work the same way — this hasn't been maintained. Requires you to run a persistent webhook server just to do file conversion, which is operational overhead for a simple task that a GitHub Action would handle better today. No conflict handling: if the .md file has manual edits and you push a new .docx, they get silently overwritten. The troubleshooting section is just 'check logs' — not encouraging.