After a day and a half of trying to make this work, as of 8:53 A.M. today, I finally got the other website up! Yes!

How I figured this out was from other repos that also used Metalsmith, particularly (if the repos had them) their gh-pages branch last night.

The final content from their build directory was used to put up their site. No layouts or extra files, just what was in the build. The next morning, I then looked up on how to create an empty gh-pages branch:

git checkout --orphan gh-pages

which I used to overwrite the old one, and emptied out the files there without directly deleting in the repo and adding up additional commits, with this line:

git rm -rf .

That code removed the files from any future pushes, but did not delete the files themselves.

I also used the code below in my second attempt to create the empty branch, but I won’t try this one again, since it yielded plenty of errors when I tried to switch my main directory’s branch back to master:

git rm --cached -r .

After a few more attempts and a lot of help online (which was helpful, but not by much), I made a placeholder directory away from the main, and moved all my work there. I then switched the assigned branch of the main directory back to master, which passed, and put everything back.

I used the new directory to hold the content for the final build of the website (though I would have used git init inside my build directory from main, that still caused errors that wouldn’t have allowed me to push any new commits), and after a small struggle with the git terminal trying to push into the repo’s empty gh-pages branch, I got the site up and running!

Here’s the website: http://quswan.net.

It’s pretty bare bones, but I’ll add a nav bar and hook up the links together soon. So far, it’s been both a fun and frustrating experience getting this second website together.