It is now possible to completely bypass Jekyll processing on GitHub Pages by creating a file named .nojekyll in the root of your pages repo and pushing it to GitHub. This should only be necessary if your site uses files or directories that start with underscores since Jekyll considers these to be special resources and does not copy them to the final site.

We just pushed out an updated header design for all repository pages, you can see it in action on any of our project pages

The new headers fixed some long outstanding bugs (downloading the wrong branch for example) and added a few new little features (exposing HTTP clone urls, noting which branch you’re currently on)

Hope you like ’em!

“Hey, why isn’t anyone working this week?!”

Actually, they’re working hard. It’s the Service Hooks that took the week off.

37signals released a Campfire API which requires you to provide an API Token instead of a username / password when using Campfire’s API.

What this means is you need to enter your Campfire API Token in your Campfire Service Hook to get it working again.

Here’s our Illustrated Upgrade Guide:

Now get back to work!

Since we launched Issues so many months ago, many users have asked for a way to see all the issues spread across all their repos. We don’t have a page for this on GitHub yet, but the information is exposed via the API. So, I stole some jQuery code from my own site, borrowed a little CSS, and threw together I have issues. Just enter your username and you’ll get a list of all the issues in your repos.

What you want another drinkup? Fine, but this is the last one for the year. Primarily because the next slated drinkup Thursday would fall on December 31st, and if you somehow dont know or perhaps are still under the respective drinking age in your country, everywhere is a drinkup that day.

As it is the last drinkup of the year, we’ll do it with a bang: Thieves Tavern and 125 of your favorite kinds of whiskey. Thursday, December 17th, 8:30pm.

Want to see your project on Rebase? Check out the howto! I also seem to be running short of interesting Git images as well. If you see any, and given they don’t contain Larry the Cable Guy, shoot me a message.

Featured Project

mootools-core is an object-oriented JavaScript framework that has tons of helpful utilities for working with the language’s various data types, AJAX, basic animations/effects , and more. It’s got a huge docs site, a custom builder to include just the parts of the framework you need, and best of all, an upcoming plugin repository called Forge that’s backed by GitHub. Adding a plugin is simple and encourages plenty of documentation: whip up a README, create a few standard folders and script headers, tag your release, and you’re all set. To get started, you may want to peruse the MooTorial or browse this list of solid plugins.

Notably New Projects

fix-me is a contest for $100 to fix a CSS layout that tends to produce scrollbars when they’re really not needed. Check out the site to see the problem in Firefox, Safari, or IE. If you’re brave and wise in the ways of the box model give it a shot!

mapdiff is a visualizer for changes to OpenStreetMap, a world-wide wiki map. The result is a neat video that shows the change over time for roads added, changed, and removed. If you’re up for some D hacking, give this project a look. There’s also some other resources about OpenStreetMap on refnum’s site, such as a comparsions of the open system against Google Maps.

mockfs is a simple mock filesystem for use in unit tests in Python, much like FakeFS in Ruby. It also works by replacing already known filesystem functions in the os and glob modules, and the project is even using GitHub Pages to publish some Sphinx docs of the project. Now you can TATFT with Python even faster since your FS calls don’t actually hit your FS.

jesus is a web interface to God. Religious references aside, this is a seriously useful library that uses Sinatra to serve up a site so you can see just what’s being monitored. The README covers getting this set up and installed on your server. If you haven’t seen what God can do for your important processes yet, be sure to check that out too.

go-repl is an interactive console for the highly-searchable Go language. But wait, isn’t Go a compiled language? This REPL compiles the source as you go on, making it an ideal sandbox for playing around with the language. It’s also a decent example of a usable library if you haven’t read any Go code before.

Ever wonder how many different people contribute to a project on average, or how many commits the average contributor is responsible for? What about the size of the average patch and how many files it touches?

In The impact of language choice on github projects, Aldo Cortesi attempts to answer these questions and more by analyzing some 1.5 million commits made by 20 thousand contributors across 30 thousand active GitHub repositories and presents his findings in a series of graphs with commentary:

Interesting stuff.

Aldo has made the entire dataset available as a PostgreSQL dump file and is taking suggestions for refinements or expansions to the data. So get analyzin’!

This week I released hub, a command line script which adds GitHub knowledge to a few git subcommands.

For example, clone:

$ hub clone cytzol/cope
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/chris/cope/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 415, done.
... etc ...

Because hub only adds functionality, it's safe to alias to git in your shell:

$ alias git=hub
$ git clone citizen428/ClojureX
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/chris/ClojureX/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 89, done.
... etc ...

The simplest way to install it is by pulling down the script and sticking it in your $PATH:

curl -s https://defunkt.github.com/hub/standalone > ~/bin/hub && chmod 755 !#:4

For more information, see the README or the man page.

Oh, and here's the list of enhanced subcommands.

git clone

$ git clone schacon/ticgit
> git clone git://github.com/schacon/ticgit.git
$ git clone -p schacon/ticgit
> git clone git@github.com:schacon/ticgit.git
$ git clone resque
> git clone git://github.com/YOUR_USER/resque.git
$ git clone -p resque
> git clone git@github.com:YOUR_USER/resque.git

git remote add

$ git remote add rtomayko
> git remote add rtomayko git://github.com/rtomayko/CURRENT_REPO.git
$ git remote add -p rtomayko
> git remote add rtomayko git@github.com:rtomayko/CURRENT_REPO.git

git init

$ git init -g
> git init
> git remote add origin git@github.com:YOUR_USER/REPO.git

git help

$ git help
> (improved git help)
$ git help hub
> (hub man page)

Enjoy, and please contribute!

Update: hub requires Ruby 1.8.6, 1.8.7 or 1.9.1.

CakePHP, one of the most popular PHP application development frameworks, has just moved to GitHub (github.com/cakephp).

You can read about the move at the Bakery. We welcome you, CakePHPers!

Yesterday YDN unveiled their new BrowserPlus developer portal and released the BrowserPlus Platform source code on GitHub: https://github.com/browserplus/platform

They’ve also added additional repositories to the browserplus user on GitHub. Their blog post has all the details. Cool stuff – now get hacking!

Every once in a while I find out that a project I’ve been following is actually open source and hosted on GitHub. Just recently I found out that a great project called Ushahidi is hosted here. Ushahidi is a PHP platform that crowdsources crisis information allowing anyone to submit reports through text messaging using a mobile phone, email or web form.

It is a way to aggregate individual reports (text, photos or video) sent in by people on the ground during a crisis or event such as an election or disease outbreak. It helps gather and visualize that data quickly and easily.

Ushahidi was originally developed to track reports of violence during the post-election unrest in Kenya of early 2008. Since then the platform has been used for many different applications including monitoring federal elections in Mexico, tracking global Swine Flu outbreaks and tracking medical supply stockouts in Kenya, Uganda, Malawi and Zambia.

So, if you are going home for the holidays in a few weeks and want a project you can hack on to help save the world a little, in the spirit of giving, take a look at Ushahidi. If PHP isn’t your thing, there is work on iPhone and Android apps and there is a comprehensive API to interact with installations of the platform – write a client library in your favorite language.

If you’re interested in helping, you can contact the team with the contact form on their website, or take a look at the developer wiki to see what needs doing. Or, of course, you can just fork one of the projects and send a pull request once you’ve added your awesome.

Once again it’s Rebase time. Let’s do this. (Want in for next time?)

Featured Project

mongo is a document-oriented database that’s bridging the gap between new NoSQL tools and your favorite relational databases. MongoDB is a collection-oriented, schema-free document DB written in C++ that can scale until your eyes bleed. Along with a slick query interface, MongoDB also offers automatic data replication and fail over if you need it. There’s plenty of drivers already available for you to use in your favorite language today. (MongoMapper is my favorite so far) The developer wiki is vast and has info regarding getting set up, using the DB, and all of the administration tasks you need to know. The best part though: you can fork the DB right here on GitHub!

Notably New Projects

nLess is a port of LessCSS to .NET 3.5. Less brings plenty of awesome helpers into CSS that every developer should love: mixins to promote reuse, variables for colors, and even some simple math operations. Check out how to integrate it with your ASP.NET app here.

pbrt-v2 is the second version of the Physically Based Rendering engine, which over the past few years has created some stunning imagery. If you’re up for some intense C++ graphics work, this is for you. For those inclined, there’s also a contest currently running to create an image that will go on the cover of the new book. They’re also looking for examples of depth of field, indirect lighting, caustics, subsurface scattering, all which are possible with pbrt. Check out project’s site for more info.

jaml is JavaScript templating engine inspired by HAML. There’s no indentation or compilation, just plenty of syntactic sugar over document.createElement. If you’ve ever had to deal with the various DOM methods to create elements on the fly, you’ll definitely want to look at this project. There’s a great tutorial here on the author’s blog, and the project’s GitHub Page has just what you need to get started.

defender is game is set on a fictional planet, where the player must defeat waves of invading aliens while protecting astronauts. I mean, this is a Ruby API wrapper for Defensio, which is a neat spam fighting API that you can hook up to your site. The great part about this specific project is that it’s already got a full set of YARD docs. Defeat the aliens spam and progress to the next level give your users one less thing to worry about.

After a long hiatus, we’re linking to merge commits again. We truncated merge commits months ago, because they didn’t provide any information beyond the shas of the parents, but now we’re exposing the diff between them as an overview of what changed in the branch.

Essentially, what we’re doing behind the scenes is: git diff parent1…parent2

This page will become the basis for a more extensive code review system that, coupled with our current code commenting, will really provide a lot of value for large projects.

(If older merge commits aren’t showing diffs, it’s most likely that it got cached without the additional data)

Dont worry fellow San Franciscans! There’s still a drinkup slated for the home front. We’ll be in SOMA at John Colins this Thursday December 3rd at 8:00pm.

That’s right, three different drinkups, three different states. A free Large account for life to anyone who can make it to all of them (proof obviously required. Also, the recipe for your teleportation device).

I’ll be in Philadelphia this week and my pal trotter and I will be orchestrating a GitHub Drinkup on Thursday, December 3rd at 8:30pm at National Mechanics (map). If you’re in town, come on by to escape the cold and grab a brew with some good friends. First drink’s on us!