Jekyll - Katy Huff
Attending
- Sandra Bogetic
- Alejandra Jolodosky
- Staffan Qvist
- Madicken Munk
- Katy Huff
- Jason Hou
- Daniel Wooten
- Ross Barnowski
- Andy Haefner
- Fatma Imamoglu
- Rachel Slaybaugh
- others…
Katy Huff
Katy Huff is a postdoc with NSSC and BIDS.
Jekyll
This very site is made with Jekyll. Jekyll is a Ruby-based, blog-aware, static site generator.
Two ways to host your Jekyll site for free on GitHub
Everybody needs a website. Google yourself. What happens? Let’s get you a website.
username.github.com master branch
Every time someone creates a user name on github, a special space on the internet is reserved for them at theirusername.github.com (and .io, it’s a long story).
If the user “lisemeitner” existed, then she could create a repository on github called “lisemeitner.github.com” (or .io, it’s a long story). If that repository has a master branch, then GitHub will try to render it with Jekyll and serve it up to the internet at lisemeitner.github.io. Note that jekyll plug-ins used by GitHub are very minimal. Try not
If Lise doesn’t want to use Jekyll, that’s cool. Sites on GitHub can be plain boring old html (like katyhuff.github.io. To keep GitHub from trying to render it as jekyll, she has to add an empty file (.nojekyll) in her repository. Additionally, an index.html file has to exist at the top level of her repository, or else there will be nothing there.
gh-pages branch
If Lise also has a project called fission, she can have a website for it too. That website can sit on the internet at lisemeitner.github.io/fission. All she has to do is put either jekyll stuff or a static html page in the gh-pages branch. The same rules apply as far as .nojekyll and plug-ins are concerned.
For an example, check out katyhuff.github.io/cyder.
How does the THW site work?
Please look at the readme. We’re gonna make some changes.
What’s this config file?
It’s for configuring the site, silly! Let’s check it out.
What’s all this stuff at the top of the posts?
It’s YAML metadata. Let’s talk about it.
Serving it up locally
So, rather than rely on github to render the jekyll and serve it up on the internet, you can also render it locally and check it out on your localhost. You’ll need to have ruby installed. Then:
gem install jekyll
Then, if you navigate to a directory containing a jekyll site, you can serve it up:
jekyll serve
Now open a browser and navigate to the localhost url http://localhost:4000.
What about themes?
The THW page relies on an open source theme called left. We could swap that out for another theme really easily. There are lots on the internets. Try this page.