Yes I have indeed looked over the TLP code. Unfortunately, particular to how I render the blocks (for example Choropleth · GitHub), the only cooked data that resides in the database is an html tag,
<div class="gist" data-user="mbostock" data-gist="4060606"></div>
For decorating posts, I’m currently using jquery to find the .gist class, get() the gist data according to the user and gist, then render the iframe.
For excerpts, I was hoping to use a similar method, using the untouched div in the excerpt to get the data necessary to find the thumbnail on github.