GitHub Launches Pages: Static Project and Personal Hosting

http://github.com/blog/272-github-pages

by defunkt • 18 years ago

106 35 18 years ago

github.com

tsally2• 18 years ago

Now they just need to let you map your own domain to it.

defunkt5• 18 years ago

CNAME support is planned. We just wanted to get this thing out the door.

tsally2• 18 years ago

Awesome! I should have assumed. :-)

delano2• 18 years ago

This is the best thing to happen to site hosting in a long, long time. It's possibly even the nail in the *forge coffin.

thomasmallen• 18 years ago

I thought that was Google Code.

delano2• 18 years ago

Google supplied the wood.

krschultz• 18 years ago

Like a lot of good ideas from Google (Documents springs to mind as well) it seems like the initial version had a lot of promise and then it was followed up with few revisions to bring needed features.

Harkins3• 18 years ago

Except they can never allow you to do anything dynamic on the server or you'd be able to read the HttpOnly github session cookies of anyone logged into github.com itself.

Well, they could, but they'd have to move to www.github.com exclusively, wait for all those session cookies to expire or for folks to visit and get them reset...

snitko• 18 years ago

You can read cookies from javascript, so it's not the issue. I think cookies' domain names are set strictly to 'github.com', not '*.github.com'.

KirinDave• 18 years ago

Actually, this isn't so true anymore.

A friend of mine is a web developer and he's got a shocking dynamic site that the server treats as entirely static. He accomplishes this with JSON callbacks.

http://iancollins.me

(P.S. For a good time, click on the white background box or the "3N" logo when you're using are recent webkit nightly. Ian has a... ironic sense of humor.)

mojombo• 18 years ago

GitHub cookies are restricted to github.com and gist.github.com domains (using a redirect trick to allow cross subdomain cookie sharing). You can use all the JavaScript you like on your Pages.

biohacker42• 18 years ago

If *forge, as you say, had at least decent and responsive service with CVS and SVN then perhaps it might be worth it for some people. But it doesn't! It needs to die.

mmmurf• 18 years ago

So true.

I'm still waiting for aggregation of update messages so that I can follow way more stuff, but github is one of my favorite sites on the net already...

tlrobinson• 18 years ago

If would be neat if you could integrate the wiki into the site, with matching style (just a simple HTML layout for the wiki plus control of the CSS). If we could do that, I would consider moving a whole open source project's site to this.

mct• 18 years ago

It is a wiki, if you treat it like one. That's what's so cool about it.

Two years ago, we moved the Philadelphia LUG website (http://phillylinux.org/) from a set of static HTML pages to a subversion repository. I dropped in a post-commit hook to update the DocumentRoot after each checkin, and the site instantly became the best wiki I've ever used. Revision history is handled by diff, and svn blame. Updates are made with your favorite $EDITOR. And, as an added bonus, you get to use real HTML rather than some silly wiki markup language. I love it.

zacharydanger• 18 years ago

You should checkout my post-commit script. It does essentially this, but for remote checkouts over SSH.

http://htrm.designsauce.org

boucher• 18 years ago

One of the most important parts of being a wiki is having a low barrier to entry. Revision control systems (git even more so than svn or cvs) is a huge barrier to entry.

babyshake• 18 years ago

I really like this, but I think a lot of the examples so far aren't really taking advantage of what makes this different.

What makes Github different is that it's connected to your version control, so I don't see this being especially useful for things like personal websites, but it could be a great way to supplement the admin and analytics offered by Github already.

Locke• 18 years ago

Yeah, this might make a nice tool for publishing any api docs (checkout a separate branch, generate, commit, and push your api docs), or code coverage reports, etc.

I don't know if it's really taken off, but a bug tracking tool like ditz could really benefit from this (it can generate an html report based on the bug "database" stored in your git repo).

http://ditz.rubyforge.org/

Raphael• 18 years ago

GitHub is taking over the world. I wouldn't be surprised if non-programmers start finding uses for it.

tdavis• 18 years ago

I would be incredibly surprised if such a thing happened. Not because GitHub isn't awesome (it is), but because most non-programmers would look at you funny if you said "distributed version control". I mean, most people can barely use the Internet competently.

raju• 18 years ago

This looks really cool. Looking forward to trying it out...

mhartl• 18 years ago

I wish the GitHub guys would stop working so hard; they're making everyone else look bad by comparison. ;-)

wastedbrains• 18 years ago

OK everyone share your personal pages / github user names...

http://danmayer.github.com

(lame site but just put it up for the hell of it)

gojomo3• 18 years ago

Great idea and implementation.

There may be some risk with allowing arbitrary-content (including Javascript) on subdomains of github.com. I tried a few trivial cookie/script/iframe tricks, and was not able to reach logged-in user info. However, my skills are far from the state-of-evil-art. Note that even Google put their page-hosting on a separate 2nd-level-domain, googlepages.com, rather than a subdomain of google.com.

defunkt5• 18 years ago

Please see my other comment. You cannot get user login information from Pages.

gojomo3• 18 years ago

In some browsers, there's currently a way:

Safari and IE (but not FF or Chrome) will display 'text/plain'-served-content as HTML. That means the GitHub 'raw' view of project content can be used to execute arbitrary user JS from github.com.

Such JS can get at a logged-in user's name and make (at the very least) superficial changes to profile information. A harmless demo (works on Safari and IE) is here:

http://github.com/gojomo/scratch/raw/master/getuser/index.ht...

Trivially, then, a Pages subdomain can use the above in an iframe to export the username out. Demo:

http://gojomo.github.com/getuser

The 'raw' issue seems more serious and isn't affected by whether Pages are on .github.com subdomains or not. Still, subdomains have a slight leg up on exploiting any security slip-ups and browser bugs that may occur.

lallysingh• 18 years ago

Anyone else click on the link for you.github.com, expecting a demo page?

GitHub Launches Pages: Static Project and Personal Hosting

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