TinyMCE, an HTML WYSIWYG editor written in JavaScript, has moved to GitHub: https://github.com/tinymce

Their announcement lists the main reasons they chose GitHub:

1. Community
2. Speed
3. Ease of access
4. Flexibility

Welcome to the party!

I have a few quick Pages updates worth noting. Jekyll has been upgraded from v0.5.4 to v0.5.7. You can find a list of changes in the history file. And, by popular demand, requests for you.github.com/some/file are now rewritten to you.github.com/some/file.html (e.g., this and that).

IMPORTANT UPDATE: We had the wrong address listed in the original post. The event is at King St Wharf, not Newtown.

Join Tom and Scott next Monday at 6pm as they stop in Sydney to bring you the joy of the American drinkup on their way to NZ. Discuss whether code flushes the same direction in the southern hemisphere and if kangaroos really do prefer Git. Crocodile wrestling and dropbear hunting likely to ensue.

Our sysadmin guys, Anchor, are co-hosting the meetup, so come say hi to them too!

The Facts:

6pm, Monday, Jan 18th
James Squire Brewhouse
22 Promenade King St Wharf, Australia

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This is pretty great: Gordon is an open source Flash implementation in JavaScript by tobeytailor.

Demos: https://paulirish.com/work/gordon/demos/

It even works on the iPhone: https://twitpic.com/xxmi2

I can’t wait to try it out. Thanks Tobias and Paul!

joshthecoder said, "It’d be great to jump to a random repository on GitHub. Like the “Random article” feature on Wikipedia."

I said, “Yes, it would.”

Tada: Random Repository

Drag that link to your bookmark bar and have some fun.

We recently rolled out a bunch of improvements to commit pages to make reviewing diffs a bit more pleasant.

Diffstats

Diffstat style histograms of insertions and deletions for each file are now displayed on commit pages. This is useful for getting a high level feel for the impact of a commit:

The diffstat display is similar in spirit to the output generated by git diff --stat: a numeric representing the total number of changed lines (insertions + deletions) followed by a simple visualization of the insertion to deletion ratio.

Rename Detection

Git doesn’t track file renames, but it does support heuristic detection of renamed files when performing diff and log operations. We’ve enabled it. The file list now displays a single line for renames instead of separate file add/remove lines:

While it’s nice to see renames reported as such in the file list, the larger benefit comes with the actual diff. Without rename detection, commits with even a small number of renamed files can generate large and noisy diffs. The entire file contents is displayed twice: first with all deleted lines and then again with all added lines. These same diffs are reduced down to pure signal with rename detection enabled because only the lines modified between the two files are shown:

See the -M option to git-diff(1) for information on using rename detection from the command line.

Added / Removed Files

Previously, files added or removed in a commit were shown in the file list at the top of commit pages but the actual diffs were omitted. This was a simple guard against Insanely Large Diffs That Crashed Browsers but had a few notable drawbacks:

• It was easy to miss important changes introduced by added or removed files when reviewing commits.
• It wasn’t possible to comment on specific lines in added or removed files.
• It didn’t always avoid large diffs. Consider cases like SQL database dumps where each line of a large generated file is modified as part of an otherwise tiny commit. Omitting added/removed files gave no guarantee that diffs would not exceed a reasonable size.

According to Aldo Cortesi’s GitHub project analysis, the average commit touches about 4 files and 19 lines of code. We felt that commit pages needed to do a better job showing all pertinent information on these common case commits, so from now on you’ll see diffs for added and removed files:

Large Diffs

Displaying added/removed files left the problem of how to deal with very large diffs. What we came up with is a set of rules for omitting portions of large diffs that ensures a sane upper bound on overall diff size. It works something like this:

• Diffs are not shown for any individual file with more than 300 changed lines (this includes modified files as well as added/removed files).
• No more than 150 total file diffs are displayed.
• No more than 3,000 total changed lines are shown across all diffs.

While we expect to tune these numbers over the coming weeks, the result so far has been diffs that show more of what you typically want to see and less of what you don’t.

Happy 2010! Hope your new year is off to an amazing start. With the holidays behind us, we are ready to kick off another season of drinkups at home and abroad. This week we’re heading to Wish, as in ‘If you wish upon a bar.’ Er star. I meant star.

The Facts:

8pm Thursday, January 14th

See the archives and more over at rebase.github.com! Want in for the next rebase? As you can see, I’m a bit web biased today, but I’d love to get more projects from other corners of the software world in here.

Featured Project

node.js is bringing server-side JavaScript back with a vengeance. In the words of Simon Willison, it’s a genuinely exciting project that brings an evented I/O server inspired by EventMachine and Twisted to the blazing Google V8 engine. Never heard of evented I/O based web servers? Bunnies can explain it to you better than I can. Code speaks louder than words or rabbits, and you can check out node_chat to see an example application. The project’s site also has plenty of documentation and information to help you get started.

Notably New Projects

friendly is a Ruby library that uses MySQL like it’s a NoSQL document data store that was inspired by how FriendFeed uses MySQL. Behind the scenes, Friendly serializes attributes on your classes as JSON, and then maintains indexes for them in separate tables. This allows your data to be schemaless, so you can add or remove what you need on the fly without it taking hours to process migrations. Get your friendly on here.

phpunit has been around for a while, but it recently moved over to GitHub full time. This testing framework is packed full of features, including mocking, code coverage analysis, and integration with Selenium. There’s a great set of docs to help you get set up with testing your own site. PHP developers, you’re now just a git clone away from TATFTing.

OpenFlowSharp is a port of OpenFlow, an open source CoverFlow API replacement to MonoTouch, a port of the Mono project to the iPhone/iPod Touch. The end result looks just as nice and this project will bring a C# equivalent to match the original code. If you haven’t seen MonoTouch, here’s a perfect opportunity to jump in and get coding on your iPhone in a different language than Objective-C.

oos is an operating system that uses the ooc language predominantly. If you’re into low level kernel hacking in semi-high level languages, this project is for you. Fire up your favorite emulator and get hacking!

erlang_websocket is a WebSocket implementation in Erlang and MochiWeb. If you haven’t heard of it yet, WebSocket is a new specification that defines two-way communication between clients and servers, and is already conveniently implemented in Chrome. According to Joe Armstrong, this spec is set to replace pretty much every other way of doing asynchronous communication on the web. This project lets you hook into the WebSocket API in Erlang, and comes with the obligatory chat app example as well.

It’s great to see more and more companies embracing open source. The latest to put their code on GitHub is Palm, with repos related to their webOS product.

They join an impressive list of companies including: Digg, Facebook, Yahoo!, Six Apart and the list goes on!

Ruby has Gemcutter, Python has Pypi, and now PHP has Pearhub!

Whether your project is hosted on GitHub or somewhere else, Pearhub makes it easy to publish. Check out the FAQ or Introductory Blog Post for more info.

(Oh yeah, best part: Pearhub encourages (and works best with) Semantic Versioning)

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.