Easy guide to making your own [githubname].github.io page.
GitHub is awesome. It's so awesome that they even provide you with super basic web hosting for static pages, so you can re-up your old GeoCities site. However, their documentation isn't that stellar, so I wrote up this quick little guide...
1) Make a new repo on GitHub with the following name: [username].github.io
The name before github.io needs to be your exact GitHub handle. So if you're xSk8oRDiEx on GitHub, it'll be xsk8ordiex.github.io, sorry.
2) Once the repo is created, go to the settings (last item in the menu on the right):
3) Click on the Automatic Page Generator (you can skip writing in content on the following page):
4) Select a template and click publish!
Great! Within 15 minutes, you should be able to visit yourname.github.io (or in my case, cmdoptesc.github.io). And to edit the site, clone down the repo and edit it like any other static site. If you want to run Node.js, you'll have to look to paid hosting, or get a trial at Heroku, or Nodejitsu.
If you own a domain and would like to direct it to yourname.github.io, check out GitHub's help page. In short, it's a two-step process of (1) modifying information on your registrar (e.g. NameCheap or Gandi) like this:
And (2) adding a CNAME file to the root of the repo. CNAME should have no extensions, and should contain one simple line: yourdomain.com
Individual repos (aka projects) on your account can have their own pages, which will take the form of yourname.github.io/[repo name], or yourdomain.com/[repo name]. You can do this manually, or again with the automatic page generator. The basics here is creating a branch named gh-pages in the individual repo.