Get Started With GitHub Pages (Plus Bonus Jekyll) | Hacker News Reader

Get Started With GitHub Pages (Plus Bonus Jekyll)

24ways.org

One warning with gh pages: sometimes they can't handle a flood of users and report "503 Backend is Unhealthy". This unfortunately happened to me last month when https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6722197 was on the front page here (http://oss.sheetjs.com).

Good news is that they at least check the status: https://status.github.com/messages/2013-11-13

Interesting- I wonder if that's just project pages. I keep my blog (http://jordan-wright.github.com/blog) on Pages, had a few things hit the front page but never reached a limit.

Thanks for the heads up, though.

It's an organization page: https://github.com/SheetJS/SheetJS.github.io

(configured with a custom domain as per https://help.github.com/articles/setting-up-a-custom-domain-... )

I love (and host my blog on) Pages, but really can't stand Jekyll. The template language, Liquid, is incredibly restrictive because GitHub wants to sandbox you. I would suggest using nanoc, Middleman, Stasis or similar and compiling it locally. I myself use a hacked Rails app that spits out static HTML.[1]

Keep in mind that you also don't control things like HTTP headers, which are very important for a static site. You want to cache assets forever, pages for a while; and you probably want to fine-tune your gzip settings or precompile gzip files as part of your compile process. These things are possible with your own server and AWS but not Pages. Its benefits are simplicity and cost, but they come at the cost of power and performance.

[1]: https://github.com/devlinzed/devlinzed.com

Check out my startup BitBalloon (https://www.bitballoon.com) - as simple (or simpler) as GH pages, but with all the right caching headers set out of the box and built-in gzipping and image compression.

Really great article for anyone just getting started with hosting something on Pages. Anna breaks everything down so it's very simple. I had just finished building my personal blog using Jekyll and Pages when this came out. Would have been a nice resource.

I did have a stupid issue with not understanding how Github compiles Jekyll that I totally didn't understand after reading the docs, so I posted a little thing about it for anyone else who might be stupid, like me: http://davidgillhespy.com/2013/12/18/pushing-jekyll-to-githu...

Personally, I prefer Harp[0] over Jekyll, simply because while it provides the metadata features of Jekyll, it also does all my asset pipelining and allows me to use a multitude of templating languages. It's also less opinionated in terms of file structure, and I host my blog with it on github pages for that reason as well.

[0] http://HarpJS.com

I've been hosting my personal blog on GitHub pages for a year now and it's been great. One shortcut I took is starting with Jekyll Bootstrap (http://jekyllbootstrap.com/) instead of starting from scratch.

I'm hoping GitHub will update their copy of Jekyll at some point.

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