Publishing html presentations on Github
You’ve seen those fancy html presentations on the web? Reveal.js is a framework to create such things of beauty. And it goes along well with my Markdown based style of writing, even for presentation slides.
I usually create the presentations on my laptop, using Pandoc to convert to html. In principle, this should be ready for the web by default. If only I had an easy hosting solution to move it to.
Github allows you to host html files and even complete web sites. I had never tried it myself, but now I did. It’s really simple. Move your repository into the branch gh-pages
(you can do this on the Github website) and finished. The web site is accessible via http://<username>.github.io/<projectname>
. This is what Github calls a Project Page.
Behind the scenes, Github uses Jekyll for building static website from source files in, e.g., Markdown format. When you publish something to the gh-pages
branch, it automatically kicks in… and gave very vague errors in my case.
After some trial and error, I found out, the best approach is to install jekyll
yourself and launch it locally. This immediately gives a readable error message. It turned out I had a stale symlink in my directory tree. Removing this removed the building issue for Github.
The result can be seen here: http://tverbeiren.github.io/BigDataBe-Spark.
BTW, in order to install jekyll
on my MacBook Air, I had to install a newer version of Ruby
(tip: use rvm
for this, link).