‣ In the past, building websites with features like consistent templates
and lists of aggregated content meant setting up complex content
management systems. These CMSs consisted of templating logic,
application code, and content databases so they could assemble
webpages each time they were requested by site visitors. They
were complicated systems that depend on many separate
applications working together, like a web server to route page
requests to a PHP application that uses pre-defined page layout
templates to format content that’s stored in a MySQL database.
Serving a page request required at least three separate applications
all working together — any one failing would bring down the
system…
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‣ From open source frameworks like Drupal, Wordpress, and
Expression Engine to multi-million dollar proprietary applications
that the government and big corporations procure from companies
that also build tanks and battle ships, these systems produce the
same exact output: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files that web
browsers know how to format into the webpages we see. Additional
features like RSS or JSON API feeds are just new templates for the
same content, and backend workflow modules like those for
embedded media and handling email notifications are really separate
systems that introduce complexity when integrated with the
publishing system.
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By October I was fed up
• 130 outages over 6 months (24+ hours of downtime)
• AWS, Nginx, microcache, APC, opcode, page, and object cache,
Varnish, buzzwords++
• WTF is a weekend?!
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!
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!
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Feb 2013 - I want moar!
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March 2013 - The inside man
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Pulling back the curtain
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Every developer has an itch
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April - down the rabbit hole
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May - Jekyll 1.0
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August - GitHub Pages Gem
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October - A lightbulb
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November - Gem-based plugins, Ruby
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December - CDN
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December - Tutorial
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December - Build feedback
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Feb 2014 - Metadata, mentions,
emoji, and redirects
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June - Docker
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May - Docs
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July 2014 - Jekyll 2.0
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September - Pages Health Check
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January - GitHub Help
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GitHub Pages Architecture
GitHub.com -> Pages Worker -> File Server
File Server -> Front End Server -> CDN
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!
Eight lessons learned hacking on GitHub
Pages for six months
http://git.io/vJ8uj
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!
An @benbalter-centric history
of GitHub Pages and Autoblog
Ben Balter
@benbalter
government@github.com
government.github.com