Git has an handy feature that you can get a system-wide .gitignore file. This is particularly helpful to keep your project .gitignore files lean. However, Git was originally built for Linux and sort of begrudgingly supports Windows, which sometimes leads to oddities (like this):

Where do you put your global .gitignore file on Windows to automatically have it loaded?

So the scenario is thus: There is a project that I want to contribute to that is a Mercurial (Hg) repository (or ‘repo’ for short). I’ve taken a liking to Git; GitHub in particular with their new and beautiful Windows frontend. So how do I take a remote Hg repo and push it to GitHub. As follows (the following assumes you have a Ubuntu box available to play with, although I imagine many Linux machines would work the same way):

In addition to my blog, I have a couple of static webpages that I host at Minchin.ca. Sadly, they’ve been a little neglected of late, but I’ve enjoyed being able to put a few pages and play around with HTML. Since I don’t run any ads on them, or run a business from them, I’ve trying to avoid having to pay for hosting. In the almost 5 years they’ve been online, I’ve managed to find a place to host them for free: first at Google Pages, and then at Microsoft Office Small Business. Google closed Pages in 2009 and Microsoft’s offering will start charging for hosting the end of next month. So I’ve been looking for a new place to host them. Today I completed the move to GitHub!