How do I prevent the GitHub Pages "Automatic Generator" to remove everything before regenerate the site?

Question

I created a wonderful GitHub Pages website for my little project, and I added some other pages into the gh-pages branch. My problem is that, everytime I regenerate the website from 'Settings=>Automatic Page Generator', everything is cleaned up and I have to restore the files manually.

Is there a way to prevent, or work around this?

It would have been much better if the Automatic Generator was just overwriting his stuff without removing existing files.

Answer 1

1. Checkout the gh-pages branch.
2. mkdir _layouts
3. move index.html to _layouts
4. edit _layouts/index.html replace the the inner html of the contents section with {{content}}
5. make new file index.md
6. Paste markdown content of automatic page generator into index.md

7. prepend the following to index.md

   ---
   layout: index
   ---
   

8. create _config.yml

9. include the following in _config.yml:

   markdown: kramdown
   kramdown:
      auto_ids: true
   

   this step is to match github's markdown syntax

10. add & commit changes, and then push branch back to github.

Now you can simply edit index.md from the gh-branch in your github source browser and it will update using jekyll automatically and not mess with anything in your gh-branch.

You can also make more items editable in the layout using place holder {{page.varname}} and then adding varname:your text to the header of your index.md.