Managing project pages in github.io

xyz.github.io is a great place to host personal coding projects. To manage the source and dist and to avoid switching between master and gh-pages branch the following workflow seems to work well:

Lets say the project folder is photography which should be available in jdutta.github.io/photography.

• Local folder photography is the clone of photography repo.
• Local folder gh-pages/photography is the clone of same repo, but with only gh-pages branch. The master branch is removed.
• Make source changes in photography, like adding/changing slides, then grunt dist to generate static content in photography/dist.
• Do an rsync to copy the changed static files. rsync -avz dist/ ../gh-pages/photography/.
• Go to gh-pages/photography to commit the changes and push to github.
• http://jdutta.github.io/photography will have new content.