First Roadblock Unblocked

In class today, we talked about my weird problem with the test file that was checked out with changes. Git needs to specifically be told that some files that have CRLF line endings should keep those endings. You can do this through the .gitattributes file. I quickly wrote up a change and pushed it up. Problem be gone!

A Web Precense

I spent the evening taking a look at GitHub Pages. I’ve used GitHub Pages before; in fact, this website is hosted by GitHub using Pages. You can see the source for it here. There are two ways to use GitHub pages: automatically using templates provided by GitHub and manually by pushing files to the gh-pages branch (if a project page) or the master branch of a repository called your_gh_username.github.com (for a user page, which my site would be considered). The manual method requires a lot more work and templating. For our purposes, I think we just need a single page with a bunch of information, like how many different GitHub Page sites seem to look. If we need something a bit more complex, I’m pretty sure there are themes written for Jekyll, the static site generator that powers GitHub Pages. For more information on GitHub pages, you can check out the Pages Help section on GitHub. I’d also recommend checking out the Jekyll gem linked above.

One great thing about Jekyll and GitHub Pages is that you can write all of your content in Markdown. I’m writing this blog post in Markdown right now and it’s pretty fantastic. If you don’t know Markdown yet, check out the short documentation on its site.

I’m actually a bit disappointed in how dumbed down GitHub Pages becomes if you use the Automatic Page Generator. I used the generator to see what it was all about. The repository can be found here. The actual data for the page is stored in a file called params.json which means that the only way to edit the pages without manually typing out newline characters is by using the web interface provided by GitHub. Boo-urns!

Anyhoo, I’m going to work on making that page look all nice for Thursday, where I’m hoping to get some feedback from the rest of the class. I’m sure that a single page will be sufficient, with links to additional resources. A project like Bootstrap has a quite complex, multi-page site that isn’t possible with the Automatic Page Generator (as far as I know). If this is more of what we want (a complex site where all the official documentation for our library would live) vs what I’ll be initially working on (a landing site with basic information on how to get started and where to go for additional information) then we should discuss that in class.