Y'know that github contribution summary? It's a bit boring isn't it?
Mine's so empty it looks like a canvas. So I wrote a message to liven it up a bit:
Much better. This repo means you can to!
Requires:
- ruby
- git
- not necessarily in the same shell (for you pesky windows users).
- Clone the repo
- Run ./writer.rb, answer it's questions (help below)
- Take the contribution_set file and run the commands it contains against one of your github repos*
- git push
- Checkout your fancy contribution summary
- use a junk repo. Create one just for this. This will create a few thousand commits, and getting rid of them is a bit of a faff.
Characters currently allowed: A-Z0-9o:;!()|=+-? (case sensistive!) Github can fix about 13 characters into your summary if you set the x offset to 0. If you go over this, commits will be written in the future i.e. will start to show up in your contribution summary eventually
How many squares across to start. 0 is the left most column.
How many squares down to start. 0 is the top row. NB: letters are 5 tall, and the contribution summary is 7 tall, so a value of 1 centers the message.
How many times to commit per day. This affects how dark the contribution spots are. This is pretty personal. A good gauge is to check your current max daily contributions and double that. If this is too low, the message won't show, if it's too high then your actual commit history will fade into the background (but your might want that...)
If you followed the advice of keeping these commits in a separate junk repo, the absolute easiest way to remove the message is to delete the repo (and recreate if you want another message). Otherwise, try a reset and force push (I'm not explaining this here, it's a bit risky on actual functional repos.)