Having trouble with [username].github.io

Question

I was recently introduced to the wonder of hosting free gh-pages on github. I was able to create a few gh-pages branches for repos on my github account and had no trouble sharing and distributing links like "my_username.github.io/my_repo" and "my_username.github.io/my_other_repo". Then I learned that I could make a nice landing page by creating a repo called "my_username.github.io". All of the links worked perfectly.

I started to run into trouble when I wanted to set up a custom domain for my_username.github.io. I purchased "my_domain.com" and followed all of the instructions here. When I visit "my_domain.com", I see the content from "my_username.github.io" .... Nice! However, when I visit "my_domain.com/my_repo", I get the github 404 page saying "there isn't a github page here". When I visit "my_username.github.io/my_repo", it redirects to "my_domain.com/my_repo" and displays the same 404 page. At namecheap.com (where I purchased the "my_domain.com"), I have:

@   204.232.175.78           A (address) 
www my_username.github.io    CNAME (alias)

Then in the root of the repo "my_username.github.io" I have a file called CNAME that only contains the text "my_domain.com".

I can't seem to figure out what is wrong as this setup seems to work as intended for others. One possible culprit is that my github username is in CapitalizedCamelCase.

Anyway, I was wondering if anyone else had worked through a similar issue and had some advice. If it helps, here is a link to the actual repo in question:

https://github.com/ScottLNorvell/ScottLNorvell.github.io

Thanks!

Answer 1

Now that you have a custom domain, your project pages are available at yourcustomdomain.com/project_page.

When you setup a GH Pages site for username.github.io and use a custom domain, you can no longer access project pages from username.github.io/project_page, but you can access them from yourcustomdomain.com/project_page directly. While there is a redirect in place for username.github.io => yourcustomdomain.com, there is no redirect for username.github.io/project_page => yourcustomdomain.com/project_page so you should point all links/traffic for your project pages directly to yourcustomdomain.com/project_page.

More info on custom domains for GitHub Pages and automatic redirects here: https://help.github.com/articles/setting-up-a-custom-domain-with-pages#automatic-redirects

Also, please note that you should not be using both a CNAME and A record from your DNS provider, only the A record. You should remove the CNAME record from your DNS providers settings because that is handled on GitHubs servers via the CNAME file you have in the root of your pages repo.

NOTE: I work at GitHub. Let me know if you still have trouble.