02.08 GitHub Pages

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Register Domain from GitHub Student Developer Pack

The GitHub Student Developer Pack provides multiple options for registering complimentary domain names.

.me domain for 1 year from Namecheap.com
.tech domain for 1 year from .tech domains
.live domain for 1 year from Name.com

A custom domain allows you to control content on the web. A domain is just a locator like a postal address, room number, phone number, social media id, or email address. A domain alone does not have any content. A phone number is not a phone and the number does not have any content. For the phone number to have value or meaning, it must point to a specific phone and connect to it when entered on another phone. The same is true for a domain name.

To associate content with a domain name, the domain needs to point to and connect to online hosting. There are many hosting providers that range in price from free to much more expensive.

GitHub Pages offers a free and convenient way to host static web content for your programming projects and creative coding files. Your project files in your local development environment can be linked to online repositories at GitHub and serve as the basis for a website.

What is static web content?

Many websites that you visit are dynamically served from a hosting server. Each time you send a request to the server, a program assembles the webpage based on parameters and then sends you the web page. If multiple people are looking at an online shopping cart, the items in the cart need to be unique to each person. There are many other examples of “server side” dynamic web pages and applications, but all of them require processing to occur on a server. Wordpress sites use a server side language, PHP, to manage the post database and to build the webpages for users on the fly.

GitHub Pages hosting does not allow any server side processing. All of the files hosted there are “static” they are served “as is” from the server. That means that they can be served quickly since the serve does not have to build the page each time it is served. Processing can occur on the client side in the browser with JavaScript. But databases, email forms, or other 2 way input is not possible. GitHub Pages is designed for hosting code and project files. That is perfect because we will use it to host and display our creative coding code and interactive projects.