GitHub along with services similar to it like GitLab, Gitorious and BitBucket make use of git. Git happens to be a distributed version control system which has been written by Linux creator, Linus Torvalds. Though, git is similar to various version control systems like CVS or subversion but, its unique feature is that, it is distributed. The good news for a web development company is that, if a git project is cloned, the whole project history is available. Therefore, it becomes possible to tag, branch and commit everything on a local machine without the need to interact with a server. When it comes to other centralized VCS’s every interaction occurs within the server.

GitHub along with services that are identical to it brings the benefit of decentralized VCS to centralized service. Similar to a developer, GitHub stores copy of a project’s repository. This is then designated as the central repository of a project from where all the developers pull and push changes from and to that repository. The best part about GitHub is that, it allows developers to fork the repository of a project and they can use that as a central repository of their own. It is from here that “pull requests” can be sent to primary project with all the necessary changes and project maintainers review the changes before they decide to keep or discard these changes.

A Static Website Blog with GitHub Pages

With GitHub Pages it is possible to develop as well as host static website of a project by committing HTML pages to some separate repository. This proves to be extremely useful for a web development company as they can write additional documentation for a project, start blogging and even provide it with a web presence. It is crucial to remember that repositories which have been set as private on GitHub create public pages. This feature was specially created for projects for easy publishing of documentation.

Some of the Benefits of Using GitHub Pages:–

Easy Contribution to Open Source Projects

In the present scenario, GitHub turns out to be the preferred choice when it comes to managing an open-source project. The major benefit for a web development company is that when it works on an open-source project, an issue tracker and a wiki can also be included for detailed documentation as well as to get feedback about the project. Django, Ruby on Rails and Symphony all make use of GitHub for developing a project as well as accept community contributions. On the other hand, Drupal does not make use of GitHub as hosting is done on a central git repository owned by them. The primary repository of Drupal is mirrored on GitHub however the contribution process is a bit different for modules as well as for core. Though, git can still be used but, patches need to be sent directly to issue tracker.

Documentation

GitHub is well known for its excellent documentation. The guides along with the help section on GitHub have nearly every article related to different git topics. Whether you wish to know about generation of SSH keys or good git workflow, you’ll find a guide that will help you with your concern. Apart from that, you can also get sample gitignore to help you out with your next project. Thus, web developers hardly find it difficult to know about a topic related to GitHub that they are not aware of.

Markdown

Not aware of markdown? Well, it is the way to write formatted documents with the help of text editor. Nearly everything has been turned to markdown by GitHub: the wiki, issue tracker, comments and more. GitHub makes use of “GitHub flavored markdown” which allows making some changes to standard markdown thus, making it useful for a programming environment.

Easy Publishing of Different Files

It is possible to update, read, delete and create text based files with the help of the web interface of GitHub. However, uploading binary files in a similar way is not possible. Web developers looking to include images on their website, need to take it to a native application or the terminal. GitHub allows you to point and click your way to express yourself on public internet without the need to deal with a system’s overhead for blogging.

Wrapping Up

There is no doubt about the fact that, GitHub pages has huge potential and a web development company can benefit in many ways from it. Its inherent programmability along with various other features makes it a powerful contender ahead of other platforms like WordPress, Tumblr and Amazon S3. It has the perfect combination of collaboration, simplicity, power and price that takes it way ahead of some of its competitors. It is expected that in the near future GitHub will surely come up with a broader appeal.