How to host and manage static sites (of unlimited size) for free on Github
github.com
github.com
At first I was more than happy that for every commits, I can see the changes immediately, but after few days, it just keep showing the old build. I even started a fresh new accounts and setup a new user page, same thing happened. I tried many things to make it work, adding/removing CNAME, changing the page content, even waiting for few days, no luck. Tried to contact the Github team (via Twitter and the Contact Us page), no respond.
Now I am using my shared VPS to host a static site, waiting for some good news about build reliability, until then I wouldn't recommend using Github user pages.
Oh and by the way, if you set a CNAME, you wouldn't be able to access your project pages without adding it as a submodule into your user page.
Unrelated to porn this sort of thing could be great in general as all the content is searchable it would be a goldmine for information on how to use a function or do some specific action. I already use git as a codex of sorts!
and
If your bandwidth usage significantly exceeds the average bandwidth usage (as determined solely by GitHub) of other GitHub customers, we reserve the right to immediately disable your account or throttle your file hosting until you can reduce your bandwidth consumption.
I wouldn't worry too much about it.
They'll have to restrict it to some extent, but neither is it 1995 anymore. GeoCities was able to make a go of 15MB per free website (with bandwidth caps) for 14 years (1995-2009), and it's still available in Japan, but I don't know the current terms.
Serving static content you don't pay for from storage you already own down pipes you already pay for is just about the cheapest way there is to be online by any metric. I wouldn't be surprised if they could support a fairly large number of websites without blinking.
Be careful though, if you push something on gh-pages it will be public, even if your repo is private.
From what the guys at Github told me, they don't have to restrict their users as long as you don't commit obvious abuses. Either very large files or gigantic amount of files, which will both create issues with Git. In short, "don't be a dick".
Basically, Github is my free host, database and api.
The license part of the README.md says "The content in this repo is BSD licensed".
AFAIK licensing requires:
- A copyright line with the year (or years) and the name of the copyright holder.
- IIRC a way to contact the copyright holder is required (email, URL, etc), but I may be wrong and it's just optional.
- A copy of the license grant/notice is required, ie. the "boilerplate notice" form Apache license that includes a link to the full license text.
In this case, does the "The content in this repo is BSD licensed" sentence have any kind of effect?
EDIT: ate a word, formatting
Generally a author has copyright over their works without having to explicitly says so. Saying "Copyright (c) YYYY AUTHOR NAME" is just a way of asserting it to remove potential confusion or ambiguity.
With no licensing, there is no right to use a copyright work (except fair use). BSD licensing a work is granting permission is a set of circumstances, not revoking permission. Thus if a license is not correctly applied the work cannot be used, rather than the inverse.
As for "The content in this repo is BSD licensed" - the usual licensing wording is again a convention designed to be as clear as possible, but the wording applied there probably counts as it pretty clearly intends to give permission. The "probably" is why people ought to stick to known and understood conventions.
They just don't care because you end up doing something that takes you 5 minutes and little to no energy which would be next to impossible for them.
Since the margins are so high, you also have freedom to make nice discounts without a loss.
That was a great internet. The people's internet. I was 13 years old but I was allowed to make a website for free, with no help or direction from parents or teachers or anyone, with barely anything to learn.
And when I was done it was there. It was a thing I made on the internet and I could show anyone. And I did, and it was probably embarrassingly bad, but that's not the point.
I think more than anything in my career, services like Geocities inspired me.
See the internet? You can make it. You can do this stuff. It's not that hard.
Nobody else in my life told me that. Nobody explained to me that creating things on a computer wasn't magic, and if I wasn't enticed with such an easy website creator I may have never known.
What do I give my kids? What do I give my little cousins, right now, at the age of 10, that even comes close?
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Looking around there seem to be a few, but they're all so template-centric that I wonder if I'd feel the same way if I had them back then.
It's nice that anyone can peek behind the curtains and see that web pages aren't magic.
I remember getting on Geocities in 1996 and finding a burgeoning community, full of randomness and fun, all learning as we went along about how build websites. I remember mine was in the “Bourbon Street” “neighbourhood”.
I had a lot of fun that year, messing about on IRC, learning HTML, building (ugly :-) websites, helping others do the same. Can't believe I sound nostalgic about that place.
I think I'll set up my daughter (nearly 9, already has her own domain) with a GitHub account, and set up Pages so she can play with HTML, CSS and stuff.
My father always used to say "Leave the computer alone and do your homework. No one will pay you for 'playing' on the computer".
5 years later he was my first paying client. Nowadays people only pay me when I "play with my computer".
Having free home pages on Geocities did a lot for my career. What will my son gain from whatever "social" web site is around when he starts using a computer (and yeah he also already has his own domain name)?
I miss when people I know used LiveJournal. LJ encouraged people to write, long form. Then came MySpace and the birth of the status update, which was on even ground with the blog feature. Then Facebook banished blogging to the "Notes" area that nobody ever read, while elevating the status update to the central communication channel. Then, of course, Twitter boiled it down to nothing but status updates.
I miss when more average Internet users made home pages. I miss when more of them blogged, and participated in communities that revolved around the blog format rather than status updates.
> Then, of course, Twitter boiled it down to nothing
> but status updates.
Seems like a good opportunity for sever-less folks like WebScript.io or Firebase to jump in and help.
Oddly enough, I don't see any mention of this in the github article explaining how to set up a custom domain: https://help.github.com/articles/setting-up-a-custom-domain-...
echo example.com > CNAME
Then point it (if apex) at 207.97.227.245.
Pretty awesome and simple.