| [orion-dev] Github Pages, and the people behind GitHub ... |
Hi,
Just a note about a couple of interesting Github things that I learned about recently ...
My personal website ( built on Wordpress ) was hacked for a second time before Christmas.
I've maintained a personal website/blog since I came to Canada, and have tried my own code, Blogger, Moveable Type and Wordpress.
But I'm weary of Wordpress now after this second hack, and because as an able HTML5/CSS/JS developer, PHP feels unnatural to me for building websites.
I have found a way for my content to be driven from Google Drive [ spreadsheets ] via [ https://github.com/jsoma/tabletop ] for a lot of personal projects that I work with. That's an aside - the essence is that I can use Google Docs as my database, so now all I want is a simple static page - no MYSQL, no complicated servers.
Combined with this is my frustration about using FTP to upload files to a webserver. It is a limitation when using Orion - we don't have a good SFTP implementation, and it is difficult to make work well and safely. In fact if you look, you'll see that FTP remains one of the most requested features for some of the other IDEs like Adobe Brackets. Whenever I am at a hackathon I ask about how people upload to their websites and FTP is still being used a lot.
I love Coda [ http://panic.com/coda/ ] the dev tool for the mac because it integrates an editor with FTP - but it costs $100 and needs to be installed on a single computer. Coda ( and the company behind it 'Panic' ) effectively built a business around FTP with their 'Transmit' tool and with 'Coda'. Coda has a significant following on Twitter - it is a popular tool for web designers.
Simon has been telling me for ages that FTP will not survive and that I should think about using Git. So I tried installing Git on my webhost, but then learned that I'd need to pay them more to get a fixed IP address for using a Git server.
Sigh.
Enter Github Pages. [ http://pages.github.com/ ]
Github offers a website for every user account - hosted at github.io
To upload files, you push to a Github repo that you create, called [ your username ].github.io. You can point your own domain to the pages.
It is free. It is fast.
Orion is amazing for building your website with Github Pages. You never have to leave your browser, you can use any machine. If you're familiar with JS, HTML, CSS it is just an iterative process - you can view your static page using 'open with web browser' from Orion's new context menu, then quickly commit and push when you're ready.
A little more scratching beneath the surface shows that Github pages are growing in adoption within the development community. It actually supports blogging through a Ruby on Rails platform called Jekyll [ http://jekyllrb.com/ ]
Github pages run Ruby. When I searched on Twitter there were many references to different flavours of blog templates built on top of Jekyll. You blog by pushing your posts in markdown files. Beautiful, simple, static. Uncomplicated.
I really like my new website solution - it'll take much more work to complete, since it is about a week old, but it is a start for now - better than the hacked remains of my old one. And at least for now, it is free! I'm excited about the liberating way I can work on it. [ http://antonmc.github.io or http://hickory.ca ]
So I became fascinated about how they thought of Github pages and wondered who was behind Github.
A little research [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub ] led to a couple of discoveries for me ...
1] Github's CEO http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Preston-Werner ] is the creator of Gravatar [ a blog photo identity ]
2] Github's CEO is also the creator of Jekyll
He keeps a really nice blog, of course built on Jekyll, and writes really well. [ http://tom.preston-werner.com/ ]
Two thoughts:
1] Simon and I were thinking that JazzHub would really need something like Github Pages one day
2] It feels to me that I understand more about Github when I read Tom Preston-Werner's blog
I thought it was worth sharing [ but maybe you already knew this :) ]
Anton