I'm just not clear on how branching gets in the way of continuous integration here. What I've started doing is any time I change anything I do it in a branch. Once I've got my changes working, tested, and I'm ready to deploy, I merge that branch back to master. The idea here being that I could deploy from master at any time and be completely functional. That way I can just constantly deploy any time I merge something back to master.

Perhaps I misunderstood something here though. Does anybody have any thoughts on this idea?