OME MIGHT SAY, DON’T DO ANYTHING on GitHub. After the last few hours I can relate to that, but there is more to it than that. GitHub is a great platform for all sorts of development. Here are a few of my favourites:
- Lilypond transcription of Nova Organi Harmonia, more about the collection earlier this week
- Free Garamond font by George Duffner
- The Gregorian Chant Transcription Tool by Benjamin Bloomfield, which you can see in action at gabc.romanliturgy.org
Adam Wood wrote CMAA: Now with 100% more GitHub a few months ago. The idea was to have a place to share music transcriptions. There are already many places offering music in print-ready form, but not so many with editable scores in open formats. If you’ve ever had to adjust a score or a booklet and faced retyping the whole thing from scratch, you’ll know that being able to edit documents is very valuable.
So what is GitHub anyway?
Git is a version control system. GitHub is a big shiny website where you can sign up and use git to manage projects. You can Try Git in 15 minutes or sit back and watch some videos.
And what shouldn’t you do on GitHub?
Well, I was going to write a warning against deleting your repositories, because if you delete then try to make a new one with the same name, the system says you already have a repository with that name. I thought there may have been some permanent invisible archive there. Turns out it just takes a while for the repository to delete. Try again in an hour or two and everything is fine.
So, what not to do?
- Don’t jump to conclusions.
- Don’t dismiss the whole thing because it’s hard.
- Don’t be embarrassed to ask questions.
To follow my confusion see veromary at GitHub. I have a few projects I’m working on, and I hope to write more about them later.
