Pages 2.0

Prior to actually building GitHub Pages, we had been kicking around the idea for a while. I thought nobody would bother, Chris and Tom thought differently. I decided the only way to settle this was to build the system and see what happened.

>> Page.count
=> 3321

I lost, we launched this less than four months ago.

Turns out people like their custom-made personal and project homes, so we’ve been knocking off a list of new features to implement.

First up was updating Jekyll to 0.5.0, the repo powering Pages, supporting all kinds of new goodies. Read more about that update here.

Next up is project CNAME support. Previously, we only let you CNAME your main repo (username.github.com), but if you push a CNAME file to any of your repositories, we’ll hook that up for you. Please keep in mind that you’ll still need to have a paying account (or one of the repository’s collaborators will) for CNAME support. For the full skinny on hooking up CNAMEs, read the original post here, the only difference is if this is for a project make sure you’re doing everything in the gh-pages branch.

Third, we now support 404 pages. If you push a 404.html file to your repo, we’ll serve that up instead of the default pages.github.com site.

Fourth, we will automatically pull in any submodules, so you’re all set to share functionality between repos now.

Last, but certainly not least, we’ve re-architected how the backend works such that if you’re setting up your page for the first time, it’ll appear in just a couple of minutes instead of the original 10-15 minutes.

We’re pretty happy with where we’re at, but keep on forking Jekyll and let us know what else we can add to make it even better.

Written by

PJ Hyett

@pjhyett