As of this post, this blog is now hosted by GitHub’s recently announced GitHub Pages, still Webby powered, now with extra git goodness.

GitHub Pages generates a static site from a GitHub hosted repo, using Jekyll to generate the files. Jekyll understands two special directories _posts and _layouts, copying any other files and directories in the root of the repo that do not begin with an _ directly to the static site.

Webby generates a static site from set of source files (content, layouts, etc), placing the results in the output_dir (defaults to output but can be changed.)

To make Webby and GitHub Pages co-exist, I restructured my repo and made the following changes to my existing Webby site:

• The root of the repo is the output_dir for Webby
• The Webby site (source files) are in a subdirectory name _webby
• The webby command line tool should be run from within the _webby directory, not the root of the repo
• The Webby clobber target is overridden to ignore the _webby directory
• Sitefile

1 SITE.output_dir = '..'
2 
3 task :default => :clean_build

• lib/override.rb Rake monkey patch to allow overriding tasks found here

 1 # From http://www.taknado.com/2007/7/30/overriding-rake-tasks
 2 Rake::TaskManager.class_eval do
 3   def remove_task(task_name)
 4     @tasks.delete(task_name.to_s)
 5   end
 6 end
 7 
 8 def remove_task(task_name)
 9   Rake.application.remove_task(task_name)
10 end
11 
12 def override_task(args, &block)
13   name, deps = Rake.application.resolve_args([args])  
14   remove_task Rake.application[name].name
15   task(args, &block)
16 end

• tasks/github_pages.rake redefines clobber to ignore the _webby directory and the new (default) clean_build task allows for file deletions¹

 1 # We only want to remove the generated files
 2 desc "Delete the website"
 3 override_task :clobber do |t|
 4   Dir.chdir(Webby.site.output_dir) do
 5     Dir['*'].entries.reject {|entry| entry == '_webby'}.each {|entry| rm_rf entry}
 6   end
 7 end
 8 
 9 desc "Clobber, then build the website"
10 task :clean_build => [:clobber, :build]

The new workflow for adding a post to the new site is:

1. Change directory to _webby
2. Generate a new blog post
3. Run webby autobuild
4. Edit until completed
5. Commit all changes locally (git add . from the root)
6. Push the changes

¹ Webby does not know if you have deleted a source file, by forcing the entire site to be rebuilt, the deletion is reflected in the generated static files.