BusinessWeek has named the GitHub cofounders some of the best young entrepreneurs of 2009.

Thanks to everyone who tweeted their support and thanks to BusinessWeek for the write up.

Most repos use the branch `master` as their default, but Git doesn’t force this upon you and why should we? Now you can change it to whatever you want. This means two things (using ant as an example):

• https://github.com/apache/ant redirects to https://github.com/apache/ant/tree/trunk
• git clone git://github.com/apache/ant.git will have `trunk` checked out by default

Please welcome qrush (Nick Quaranto) to the core Jekyll team (now consisting of the two of us)!

He’ll be helping me keep Jekyll active and awesome by assisting with the review and merging of the millions of branches that the amazing open source world has showered upon us.

Also, if you’re serious about having your contributions merged in, please make sure they apply cleanly to the current master branch and open an issue instead of sending a pull request. This will help us keep organized!

The good doctor lives on!

Amanda developer djmitche writes:

I’m a developer of Amanda, which has been around and open source for over 15 years, but has always had a fairly small development community. We’re moving to github to try to encourage more active development by creating a more inclusive developer environment. We’re also rewriting the application in Perl, for similar reasons.

15 years! What were you doing in 1994?

Amanda, as the README explains, is a backup system designed to archive many computers on a network to a single large-capacity tape drive. If you’re a Perl monger interested in working on a mature, growing project, check it out.

mojombo, pjhyett and I will be doing a panel at Open Source Bridge in June on Bootstrapping Your Open Source Business.

It looks like it’ll be a fun conference so stop by and hassle us!

The move to GitHub Flavored Markdown for all messages and comments on the site is now complete! Any comments or messages created after 2009-04-20 19:00:00 UTC will be rendered with GFM. Enjoy!

As soon as we rolled out version 2 of the API, people started building things with it. Here are some interesting Issues based projects:

• lighthouse-to-github – Lighthouse to GitHub Issues migrator. Check the blog post.
• trac2issues – Trac to GitHub Issues import script
• gitz.pl – A Perl command line interface to Issues
• github-cli – A Python command-line interface to GitHub’s API (but just Issues for now).

Sorry about the missed weeks here folks, hopefully I’ll be back on track now. Let’s get started!

Featured Project

canary has generated quite a buzz on Twitter this past week since it’s the latest client to go Open Source. This single column Cocoa app does much more than expected: filters to weed out the bad tweets, drag and drop TwitPic integration, easy ways to add/remove/block fellow addicts, and even more. The best part? You can hack on it and add whatever features you’d like! Check out more screenshots and info about what else it can do on its awesome site. Fork away, my twitters!

Notably New Projects

github-cli is a new Python script to help you post to GitHub issues via the new API. This seems it could be a decent competitor to the GitHub RubyGem, and I hope it sees some attention soon from the other Pythonistas hanging out on the site. The gem has a good head start, but I think the Python version could catch up. A la commit!

urlshrink adds a handy shortcut for URL shortening system wide on OSX. It also provides a decent starter on how to add your own service into the mix. You could also integrate this into your own Cocoa or iPhone app and allow your users to shorten URLs there as well. This is definitely an awesome idea, and it would be neat to see it translated over to Windows and Linux as well. Get forking!

gibberish is for those who like Scheme and Jabber/XMPP. Ever wanted them both, together in one place and with plenty of parentheses? Gibberish is your answer! On a more serious note, it seems like the basics are implemented so far but there’s definitely more work to be done. If you’ve got an itch to hack on some Scheme that will actually do something practical, give this project a look.

space-clock is pretty self-explanatory: it’s a sexy looking clock, written in Clojure. This is definitely a fun look into how this language works and how well it integrates with the JVM. It would be pretty interesting to see different styles implemented, so get coding!

jtwitter is a jQuery plugin to fetch updates from Twitter in a ridiculously easy fashion, as per the standard operating procedure with most of this awesome library’s extensions. There’s plenty of options available to you already, so if you’re thinking of putting your twitter stream (perhaps published via the newly featured project!) on your blog, don’t waste your time with other methods when you can do it with literally one line of code.

I wanted to take a moment to update everyone on the stickers we offered a while ago. Tom asked you to email him if you were interested in some stickers with your addresses and number of stickers you wanted. This is where things went interestingly awry. We didn’t really expect the kind of response that we got. Though we had about 1,500 stickers to give away, we received over 1000 emails requesting more than 5000 stickers total, nearly half of them from international users.

So, how does one deal with this? If we had thought it through, we probably would have put up an online form and asked everyone to request again, so we would have a proper database of addresses. However, I felt it was too late for that, so I wrote a little ruby IMAP script that pulled each of the tagged emails out of Toms account one at a time, printed the email body out to stdout, then read from stdin so I could identify the address, possibly reformat it, and paste it back into the script. Then it asked for numbers of stickers requested, which I could find manually in the email body and paste back into the script. Then the script stored all of these in a sql database for me. 1,000 times. I did this while watching at least 3 episodes of Major Dad on Hulu in the background before that was done.

So now I have a big database of addresses, but a bunch of them aren’t properly formatted, so I can’t just print out labels. So, I printed out 30 to a page, recording an identifier for each page so I could mark them as mailed in the database as we finished each page, and my lovely wife volunteered to hand address the envelopes and mail them out.

Here’s what our operation currently looks like (this is even after the first few hundred were already sent out).

So, now we’re out of stickers, but Tom just ordered some more so all these are on their way out in a few weeks. So, if you weren’t among the couple hundred that got stickers while they lasted, you should get them in a couple of weeks.

A lot of people were excited about the Issues release yesterday, but many asked for an API for it. Because we love you all and you’re so good to us, we released one for you.

However, in addition to that, we’re opening up the first release of our whole version 2 API, including Repository, User, Commit, Object and Network APIs, with more (including Gist) on the way soon. We’re still working on it, but if you’re brave of heart, please try it out and let us know if you find any issues.

What’s even better though is we actually created some documentation for it. If you go to develop.github.com, you’ll see a new set of pages that document all the current functionality of our new API.

If you have requests or find problems with anything, please enter an issue at the develop website projects issue tracker. Also, if you write anything that uses this new API, let us know so we can add your project to our documentation pages.

Say hello to Melissa, everyone. She tweets as @luckiestmonkey, tumbles at https://luckiestmonkey.tumblr.com, codes as luckiestmonkey, and now works for GitHub!

She’ll help us run our growing business, keep you people happy, and coordinate photo shoots.

Welcome aboard, Melissa!

It gives us great pleasure to announce our integrated issue tracking system! On repository pages you’ll now see an “Issues” tab in the top menu. Here’s a quick rundown of the features:

• Deal with your issues just like you deal with email (fast, JavaScript interface)
• Create and apply labels to issues to assign to users or categorize
• Drag and drop issues to prioritize them
• Vote on issues that you want to see tackled
• Search, sort, and filter
• Close issues from commit messages
• Keyboard shortcuts

Watch this short video introduction to GitHub Issues and get started now!

Report Issues issues at https://github.com/defunkt/github-issues/issues

If you already use another issue tracker, you can disable Issues in the new “Features” section of your repository’s “Admin” tab.

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.

Everyone’s favorite davglass has released his YUI Git helper to make contributing to the YUI suite of repositories even easier. The wiki does a great job of documenting the script and his blog post provides an overview.

Very cool!

Six Apart, the company behind TypePad, Movable Type, Vox, and other services, has begun open sourcing code on GitHub as sixapart.

They join 37signals, digg, yahoo, techcrunch, shopify, and tons of other companies releasing code here on GitHub.

Welcome sixers!