While planning a workshop for Dare2BDigital, a technology conference for young women, Lukas and I were looking for an easy way for girls to edit and test their own Firefox OS apps. We were trying to think of where we could host these apps when we decided to try using Github pages.

I’d never actually made a Github page before, but I learned it’s as easy as making a magically named “gh-pages” branch in your repo. To experiment, I decided to test this out on a simple wallpaper app I’ve been working on.

$ git checkout master
$ git checkout -b gh-pages
$ git push origin gh-pages

And voila! My app showed up at http://leibovic.github.com/mural/. This seems great for development because you can just push changes to the gh-pages branch to update a hosted app. But as a bonus for our workshop, we found you can easily modify the app by hitting the “Edit” button at the top of a file on Github, then committing your changes through the web interface.

Note: After the first push it can take up to 10 minutes for the page to appear. So be patient.