Fork-n-Go!

| fôrk en gō | adjective Forking a website repository on GitHub designed to be easily used by others.

Part I: GitHub Pages

GitHub Pages is free web hosting for files on a branch named gh-pages in a repository. They can be found served up (like this site) at: username.github.io/repository.

Part II: Fork

Open source GitHub repositories can be forked by anyone else on GitHub. This creates a copy of that repository on your account. When you fork a website, you get a website.

Part III: Commit

Edit the index.html to make the changes you need to make it your own. Then commit (like saving) and your website will be live. You can do all this through github.com!

Examples ・ About ・ Contribute

Examples

Click on the GitHub repository links for the full README.md.


Type on Strap

A free open source jekyll theme. Easily customisable, with a lot of features — By Sylhare.

GitHub RepositoryDemo


Simple Personal Page

A simple personal page with a bio, two theme options or customize the HTML/CSS to your hearts content. — By @jllord.

GitHub RepositoryDemo


Jekyll Now

Jekyll Now makes it easier to create a Jekyll blog, by eliminating a lot of the up front setup. — By Barry Clark.

GitHub RepositoryDemo


Poole, the Jekyll Butler

Makes getting going with Jekyll easy peasy with example templates, pages, posts, and styles. Hyde and Lanyon themes. — By @mdo.

GitHub RepositoryDemo

Tool Lending Library from a Spreadsheet

Manage tool (or anything, really) lending with a group using a Google spreadsheet and this site. — By @jllord.

GitHub RepositoryDemo

Fullscreen Map from Spreadsheet

Takes a link to a Google Spreadsheet with coordinates and maps them fullscreen with Sheetsee.js and Mapbox.js. — By @jllord.

GitHub RepositoryDemo

Interactive locations from Spreadsheet

Connects to a Google Spreadsheet with coffee shop locations and details. An interactive map and table for searching the spots using Sheetsee.js. — By @jllord.

GitHub RepositoryDemo

Site for Kickstarter Campaign

A simple Jekyll-based site to support a Kickstarter campaign. — By @muanchiou.

GitHub RepositoryDemo

Calendar from Spreadsheet

Creates a monthly calendar from a spreadsheet with event dates and details. — By @jllord and @muanchiou.

GitHub RepositoryDemo

Archived Pocket Articles with IFTTT & Sheets

Searchable and sortable list of your archived Pocket articles. Uses IFTTT.com to send archive to Google Spreadsheets and Sheetsee.js to build it on the site. — By @jllord.

GitHub RepositoryDemo

Page Instagram & Tweets from IFTTT & Sheets

Use IFTTT.com to archive Instagram and Twitter on Google Spreadsheets and then send them to a simple personal site. — By @jllord.

GitHub RepositoryDemo

Noddity: a markdown-based wiki/blog

It's like a blog backed by markdown files, but with a few features that make it work really well as a wiki. Click around the demo site, see how quickly pages come up! — By @TehShrike.

GitHub RepositoryDemo

DOCter: a template for project documentation

Quickly build out project pages and documentation with configurable navigation and styles. — By @cfpb.

GitHub RepositoryDemo

Have an example? Add it with a pull request. Want a badge/ribbon thing? Here are some spiffy colors.

What's this all about?

Free hosting and a live site in a few clicks.

GitHub's Pages (free hosting) and fork (copying a project to another account) features are awesome tools that can lower the bar to getting started in web development.

Besides being a tool for tinerking-to-learn, it also makes having a live and hosted website more acessisble to those who may think it can't possibly be so easy.

I'd love to see Fork-n-Go pages that can be used for non profits and community groups. Tool lending libraries, directories of services...

Designer wanting to get involved in open source?

If you're a designer and know HTML/CSS then you can create a template site that can be used for open source projects or non-profits.

You can even fork this blank GitHub Pages template to get started!

Sheetsee.js Spreadsheet Fork-n-Gos

Fork-n-Go sites that use Sheetsee.js and connect the site to a spreadsheet make it easy to have your own website connected to your own data source.

If you create your own spreadsheet and copy the column headers from the original, you can then replace the old spreadsheet URL (or key) in the index.html of your fork and start using your own data.

Jekyll Fork-n-Gos

Jekyll is a static site generator (it builds HTML files and has them ready before the browser requests one) that's tuned for making blogs and Jekyll is supported by GitHub Pages. This means you can use Jekyll on a project and it will be supported by GitHub Pages.

This also means that users can fork designed Jekyll template repositories on GitHub and get going with their own blog in just a few clicks. Boom!

Want to Contribute?

Contributing is easy! Create a Fork-n-Go project or add an existing one to this page. For the latter, there are full contributing guidelines in the repository.