Instantly create beautiful GitHub project pages | Hacker News Reader

Instantly create beautiful GitHub project pages

github.com

553 pointstanoku46 comments

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. :)

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

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.

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

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."

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.

Fair point, and well-taken!

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

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

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.

Heh, seems like you beat me to the punch by 2min both here and there.

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

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

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

Basically, it should just wrap the HTML generated from markdown (if readme is markdown) in some theme.

And oif your readme.md is merely:

"GPL Licensed"

The preview page will be much less impressive. As it is the preview page has enough lorem ipsum to give the user a feel for the theme.

Good point.

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.

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.

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

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.

I would say I'd be willing to pay up to $20

Indeed, I read on TheVerge.com (I think?) some time ago about a guy who's completely self-sufficient and made upwards of $20k just selling themes on ThemeForrest for $10/download

There's actually a couple of people who have sold over $1 million of templates on Themeforest.

Really? That's fantastic for them and ThemeForrest

Look up Orman Clark from PremiumPixels.com. He's sold well over a million dollars on ThemeForest. Unfortunately, the marketplace is now filled with a lot of get rich quick schemers. I know they're (Envato) trying to work on cleaning up the community, but it's going to be a challenge as the market grows. If you want to be successful on ThemeForest in the long-term, I suggest building your own brand to co-exist with the marketplace. Orman serves as a good example of creating a brand differentiated from others. His sense of design is incredible and his success is well deserved.

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/

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

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?

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.

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

That's how I do it, it works great that way. I didn't actually set up the gh-pages as a proper submodule, I just cloned the branch to a folder. Then I added the gh-pages folder to the top level .gitignore.

That's probably better than my ill-conceived submodule idea.

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.

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 git@github.com: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.

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

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

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?

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

Of course! Thanks.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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