GitHub Pages
Sunday, December 21st, 2008 by Enrico
I’ve created a very simple web page at http://enricob.github.com/ (enricob is my username on GitHub). It lists some of the things that I’m currently working on along with a bit of information about myself. It’s not incredibly remarkable, except for one small detail: it is managed in GitHub as a remote git repository. This is a new feature from GitHub that is described in detail here.
I created a GitHub project called enricob.github.com and pushed a local master branch to it. There’s only one file at the moment, index.html. Within about 10 minutes, the site was active and the page could be seen by going to the URL above. You can see the GitHub project page by going to http://github.com/enricob/enricob.github.com.
This alone is pretty nifty but there’s one more neat feature that I haven’t been able to take advantage of yet: managing pages for other projects and anchoring them on the domain. For example, if I were to create a GitHub project called sample, create a branch called gh-pages, and push the web page files to that branch, it would become available at http://enricob.github.com/sample. This is really cool!
The more I use GitHub, the more I understand how it is so much different from sites like SourceForge. GitHub isn’t just a collection of open source projects and their pages: it is social networking with code. Find a bit of time to try Git and GitHub: you won’t regret it. =)