Open Source GitHub Pages CDN
An extensive archive of popular and less popular open source projects.
Why?
This is a community driven resource. So unlike the "big" CDNs we can can add those little projects you love... and when we add a project we take the time to properly archive it as far back as possible; jquery v1.0.0 anyone?
When?
Personally when I'm prototyping a demo on http://jsbin.com or http://jsfiddle.net and I need to pull in some common library or resource then these URLs are just dead simple to remember...
http://viewsource.github.com/jquery/1.6.2/jquery.js
Small & Fast
GitHub Pages assets are gzip'ed... which can compress the response by as high as 70%!
Response Headers
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.0.4
Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2011 12:33:57 GMT
Content-Type: application/x-javascript
Last-Modified: Sat, 16 Jul 2011 12:08:22 GMT
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: keep-alive
Expires: Sun, 17 Jul 2011 12:33:57 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=86400
Content-Encoding: gzip
Use GitHub for file browsing the CDN
If you go to http://viewsource.github.com/jquery it will redirect you to GitHub to see what versions we've got archived for jQuery in the CDN.
If you navigate down to a specific file e.g. jQuery 1.6.2 at https://github.com/viewsource/viewsource.github.com/blob/gh-pages/jquery/1.6.2/jquery.js then simply remove https://github.com/viewsource/ and /blob/gh-pages from the URL and click Enter/Return then BAM you've got http://viewsource.github.com/jquery/1.6.2/jquery.js
Alternatively you will see at the end of the viewsource.github.com / jquery / 1.6.2 / jquery.js breadcumb path there is a little "copy to clipboard" icon. This will copy jquery/1.6.2/jquery.js to your clipboard... simply paste that onto the end of http://viewsource.github.com/ and you've got your url.
Consistent and predictable versioning
We "normalize" the version numbers and remove them from the filenames e.g. jquery-1.6.js is archived under /jquery/1.6.0/jquery.js - notice the extra .0 in our folder, this makes switching between versions simple:
http://viewsource.github.com/jquery/1.5.2/jquery.js
http://viewsource.github.com/jquery/1.6.0/jquery.js
http://viewsource.github.com/jquery/1.6.1/jquery.js
http://viewsource.github.com/jquery/1.6.2/jquery.js
Dynamic "lastest" versions
A dynamic "latest" version is supported for when you want to test against whatever the most recently released version is in the archive.
http://viewsource.github.com/jquery/latest/jquery.js
Host your own!
Simply fork this project to host your own GitHub Pages CDN. You will need to fork and then do a commit and push to GitHub before they will setup your GitHub Pages hosting.
Here's my personal fork... http://chrisjacob.github.com/viewsource.github.com/jquery/latest/jquery.js
Tip: the repository only has a gh-pages branch; there is no additional master branch. So you only need to do git push when pushing to GitHub... which is much easier to type then git push origin gh-pages.
Inspired by
Github as a CDN - Cache your JavaScripts, Stylesheets, and Web Assets with Github Pages
Cached Commons - by Will Norris - has some constructive criticism of http://cachedcommons.org and this approach to building an "Open CDN" on GitHub Pages.