GitHub Keeps Busy: Adds Pages and Forked Queues

It may be the holiday season, but the folks behind GitHub are clearly not taking the month off. In the last few days, they've rolled out two big new features in their continuing quest to be the place for git-based hosting.

The first of these features is ideal for those who are using GitHub to manage a complexly networked project: the fork queue. This is the visual analog of cherry-picking in git, with an added bonus. Not only can you select individual commits to apply to your version of the project from any other fork, GitHub color codes the list to indicate which commits are likely to apply cleanly. In many cases you'll still want to stick to merging entire branches, but cherry-picking is great if you just want to swipe one or two specific benefits from another line of development.

The other new GitHub feature is GitHub Pages. If you've got an account (and of course you can get one for free), you now have web hosting. Just create a project with the right name, push content, and it ends up online. But wait, there's more: the repo gets piped through the Jekyll site generator, which gives you includes, filters, Textile and Markdown, and layouts (among other things). Suddenly a versioned blog is yours for very little effort.

Actually, come to think of it, there really is a holiday at GitHub: these are great presents for the rest of the community. I expect to see them both heavily used.

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