On Wednesday, 2/9/22, I attended a workshop, Publishing with GitHub Pages, given by Alex Gil. I attended this workshop because I was familiar with using Github as part of a software versioning workflow, but I had yet to explore GitHub Pages — a way to easily create a static website hosted by GitHub. In this workshop, Alex walked us through building a static website from a repository created on GitHub. I was impressed at just how easy it was to create a static website. The GitHub Pages sites are built using Markdown, which I was already familiar with, so I was able to build my site fairly quickly. Markdown is pretty accessible, even for folks who had never used it before, so everyone in the workshop was able to get a GitHub Pages site up and even add an iframe to stream content from YouTube. Alex spoke a bit about how GitHub Pages uses Jekyll to power the static sites and he also briefly introduced us to Wax, for those that might want to create a site that uses image collections or exhibits. In addition, he covered the ideas behind Minimal Computing — “computing done under some set of significant constraints of hardware, software, education, network capacity, power, or other factors.”

GitHub Pages is a really great way to get a simple, or complex, static website up and running pretty quickly. I would recommend that anyone with an interest, check out the GitHub pages site and starting playing around with it. I think you will be surprised at just how quickly you can put together a really nice looking website.