confessions of a ruby programmer

18 December 2008 updated 15 February 2009

Quick and easy hosted websites with GitHub

Chris Wanstrath from GitHub recently tweeted about his new website. Whilst trying to load it earlier today I accidentally misspelt his username, revealing a GitHub feature that I hadn’t come across – GitHub pages.

Simply go to yourusername.github.com and you’ll be presented with a friendly error page explaining how to set up your own github.com sub-domain website. It’s fairly straightforward – create a repository named yourusername.github.com, create a local master branch and push it to GitHub. Within ten minutes or so, your new site will be up and running. Very cool. Here’s mine (yes, fairly pointless I know). And here is another.

Update: It seems that I just beat the guys at GitHub to it with their official announcement.