Instantly create beautiful GitHub project pages

[kylemaxwell]

As awesome as these look, am I the only one who thinks that the word "beautiful" (along with "rich") has gotten overused in web design? It's become a buzzword, I think, to the point that perfectly good synonyms or even more descriptive phrases simply don't get used.

That's not to knock the substance of the post, much less the work, but perhaps it's just a bit of a pet peeve. Carry on. :)

[Camillo]

Ah, the involuntary irony of saying "beautiful" is overused while calling these designs "awesome". The word you're looking for is "good". You're not awestruck by these designs, you just think they're good.

[laconian]

Totally - and in many cases "beautiful" just means visual design fad-compliant.

[jarek]

I agree. Not many would stand to be around a person calling himself brilliant. I think people calling their own work beautiful is the same idea.

[orblivion]

I think it's an awful buzz word, it's made me cringe for a long time now.

[SCdF]

While we're playing the annoying buzzword game, I've noticed that 'delight' tends to get knocked around a lot lately.

[daniel-cussen]

So true. I almost never remember any of the things I do on the web, but when I do, I remember them as "checking my email" or "logging into facebook," not "having a rich user interaction on a beautifully designed web experience."

[mutewinter]

Surprised the default content of the page isn't set to the readme, if one exists.

[prezjordan]

Same here. While I was browsing themes I figured it WOULD put the README there, but I had to go back and edit everything after I published.

[dfc]

It seems like defaulting to readme content would make to many assumptions about the content of your readme.

[asmala]

My thoughts exactly. I posted a comment to that effect.

[envex]

I think it's because it's a separate branch, but yeah, it would probably make sense to just pull the readme from master.

[ajacksified]

Indeed. I've used http://rthauby.github.com/Paige/ for a few projects; it's a simple npm project that generates documentation from your readme file.

[pooriaazimi]

It's really great.

But it's kinda frustrating that you have to go back and forth between edit/layout... I'm sure they'll improve it soon though - It's just 1.0!

I'm liking GitHub more every day (specially since I began using NodeJS and found the plethora of NodeJS modules on GH). I'm happy they are around.

[gigantor]

Prediction: Premium GitHub readme templates for $1 coming soon. Possible new category on ThemeForest.

[zmoazeni]

I would be ok with that. I would say I'd be willing to pay up to $20. Larger projects may even have of more of a need, but then again they may or may not have the design talent who can contribute.

I believe a well designed presence goes a long way in aiding the adoption of a project.

[JoshP]

Nice to see them offer this by default.

DocumentUp is something similar, which pulls the readme and automatically makes a beautiful wiki-type document for any git repo.

http://documentup.com/

[samrat]

Are the themes used in the pages open source? They're really awesome designs.

[dfc]

My stumbling block with ghpages is the workflow. I have not found a good way to work with the project in the master branch and then my docs/web-content in the ghpages branch. A lot of time all I really need to do is take something from my master/working branch and transmogrify it and dump the output to ghpages. Maybe its something about my git-fu? Or maybe most people's ghpages is less dependent/tied-to what is in their master branch.

Am I missing something obvious?

[ajross]

You can create a local git containing only the gh-pages branch:

    mkdir my-project-pages
    cd my-project-pages
    git init
    git remote add origin [email protected]:myusername/myproject.git
    git pull origin gh-pages

Now just treat them as distinct "repos" and push independently. The basic idea here is that you're breaking up "clone" (which by default pulls everything) into its composite steps.

[orta]

In a project I have where I generated pages based of code in my master I would have two folders that both were the same repo, one just stayed as master and the other as gh-pages. Meaning I could automate moving things and then pushing from that directory.

[mdehaan]

I find the gh_pages branch confusing too -- the idea that a branch doesn't contain something related to the other branches feels weird.

What I've found is it's easier to create a free organization, and that way you can get a organization.github.com project created and host the pages there.... this is easier than juggling the spare branch. Obviously smaller starter projects should not do this, but you could use username.github.com/yourproject name and not keep the documentation on the branch just as easily.

Presto, no gh_pages branch, but all of the advantages of hosting web content.

[dfc]

Does anyone know what would happen if inside my main repo I had a submodule that was just a checkout of my ghpages branch?

   ./project  <- Main repo 
   ./project/project-ghpages <- same repo but gh-pages branch

[secoif]

I can tell I'm going to get tired of "Merlot" very quickly.

Looks nice 'till 1000 sites use the same heavy theme.

[peatfreak]

This looks very nice, but unfortunately I cannot use it because each gh-page corresponds to a specific repo, whereas my project is comprised of several repos and I want one website to document all of these repos at once.

Would anybody have any other suggestions for getting a simple homepage for a software project up and running reasonably quickly, without having to fiddle with CSS or JavaScript too much? Something like what GH Pages is trying to do, but maybe a little more flexible. Is something like WP the way to go?

[secoif]

Create an organization for your project, make pages for that organization. Or just create another repo.

[josscrowcroft]

Jesus, that is really special. Using this for next project!

[mjackson]

Would be really great if these pages were automatically generated from a project's README. It would also encourage devs to write better README's.

[wahnfrieden]

It's probably for the best to keep these as separate concerns.

[nhoss2]

I had a kind of similar idea a few months ago: http://nhoss2.github.com/gapp/

[daemonza]

What's wrong with the old README.md files. Github should be ALL about the code, not sure I really like these pages

[jakeboxer]

Don't worry, this doesn't replace READMEs! It's an extra feature for people who want a customized page for their project.

[liuliu]

Seems the link to tarball is not correctly parsed if you don't have master branch (this is rare ...).

[kghose]

You can crash it by having a page with empty content.