quirkey has written a great Guide to GitHub Pages, specifically on using the built-in Jekyll integration.

Check it out and start busting out some awesome documentation for your projects!

Yet another Sunday, yet another Rebase!

Featured Project

compass makes CSS not suck. It’s a flexible CSS meta-framework that ties together the power of SASS (Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets) and your favorite grid template system, be it 960.gs, Blueprint, or YUI Grids. Compass uses mixins to allow you to easily bring in the styles you want and integrate it without polluting your markup with tons of unnecessary CSS classes. There’s plenty of tutorials for integration with your preferred web framework as well as a great screencast on the project’s wiki. Save yourself some frustration next time you have to implement a site’s layout from the ground up.

Notably New Projects

emerge is the new build system on the block, written in Python. Armed with a ridiculously clean build script and support for fetching edge versions of dependencies from their source code repositories, this could become quite popular. Check out some examples of how simple the build scripts are for Mono and Python. This is definitely some neat stuff for projects just getting started or for those that want to get away from clunkier build systems.

pacgraph doesn’t build projects like the previous entry, but instead lays them out in a graph on your Arch Linux machine. It actually generates some really cool looking visualizations of how different programs depend on each other:

It would be really neat to see this concept applied to other operating systems, so clone away!

GLGestureRecognizer is pretty self-explanatory, but there’s one little catch: it runs on your iPhone. This is an Objective-C implentation of the Javascript $1 Unistroke Recognizer, and it could definitely have a huge impact on new apps. How to integrate this with your Fart Button is up to you, though.

prolog is not what you think. Well, it is. But it’s written in Haskell. Yeah, that blew my mind too. Check out the work that’s been done so far and give this blog post a read about how the interpreter is being implemented. There’s got to be some CS junkies out there that live for this stuff. Get forking.

Finally, if you’ve got a project that deserves some time on Rebase, let me know! This column is meant to be for the community and by the community, and if I happen to skip over your awesome gem, framework, app, or hack don’t hesitate to bug me about it.

Circa is a programming language designed for for rapid prototyping by andyfischer.

The intro page has some good information and the syntax example highlights some interesting ideas:

-- The @ operator is some syntactic sugar for rebinding 
-- an identifier to the result of the overall statement.
-- These two lines do exactly the same thing:
my_number = max(my_number, 40)
max("my_number":https://github.com/my_number, 40)
-- Lists are indicated by []s
-- List arguments also can be separated 
-- by commas or semicolons or spaces
names = ['Absalom','Bouffant','Chilton']
numbers = [1 2 3]
orders = [locate; evacuate; exterminate]

Looks neat!

Have a nerdy writer in your life? Think they could benefit from version control? Point them at Flashbake by commandline.

Or, even better, point them at this Lifehacker article on Flashbake. It goes over the concepts, setup, and use pretty well.

‘Nuff said. Grab the code and check the README.

Nicely done mattball!

iOctocat is now available on the App Store: https://itunes.com/apps/ioctocat

dbloete has written a blog post announcing it and promising some cool future features (like commit details).

Naturally it’s open source: https://github.com/dbloete/ioctocat.

Grab it from the App Store today!

GitHub Voice by tristandunn is a UserVoice-like jQuery plugin for GitHub Issues. Add it to your project’s page or website for ultimate sleekness:

Grab the code from https://github.com/tristandunn/github-voice. Thanks Tristan!

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.