
Instantly create beautiful GitHub project pages - tanoku
https://github.com/blog/1081-instantly-beautiful-project-pages
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kylemaxwell
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. :)

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Camillo
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.

~~~
kylemaxwell
Fair point, and well-taken!

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

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prezjordan
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.

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

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pooriaazimi
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.

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

~~~
zmoazeni
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.

~~~
iamdave
_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

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

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iamdave
Really? That's fantastic for them and ThemeForrest

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benackles
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.

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JoshP
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/>

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

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dfc
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?

~~~
dfc
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

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barrybe
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.

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

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

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

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peatfreak
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?

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

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peatfreak
Of course! Thanks.

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

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mjackson
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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

