The Sources of the SIGMathLing Web site

This is patterned after the OpenDreamKit site, also see the README there.

About

This website is hosted as a GitLab page. In short, is built statically from Markdown source files using Jekyll. To update a page, just modify the corresponding source and push. This can be done online by clicking on "Edit this page" in the side bar. See the above links for details.

• _config.yml: main configuration page
• _post/*.md: sources of the news and blog posts
• _layouts/*: local style files
• _includes/*: reusable chunks of web pages, like the side bar
• public/*: Jekyll style files (almost vanilla), logos, ...

How to use Jekyll to test/build this website

This is a static website automatically generated with Jekyll.

These instructions are for SIGMathLing members who wish to do more than the occasional editing.

Editing pages online with GitHub

You can edit any page by following the "Edit this page" link in the sidebar. Alternatively, you can directly navigate to the corresponding .md (Markdown) file in GitHub.

This will drop you in GitLab's file editing interface, where you can modify the source code, preview it, and save your changes, by giving a short description of what you modified. If you have write access to the repository (hint: you do), your modifications will be published right away. If you do not have right access, you will be asked to fork the repository and make a pull request.

Most of the pages are written in Markdown, which is a textual format for generating formatted text. Markdown syntax is very intuitive, you can get a quick review here or here.

Working locally

If you want to do more than the occasional editing, you'll soon realise GitHub's editor and preview are too limited. It's better to work locally on your computer.

All you need to work locally is a Git client. Clone the repository and start coding right away.

At some point, you will need to preview your work, but pushing to GitHub each time you want to preview is clumsy. Your best option is to install Jekyll and the required dependencies on your machine. It is recommended to install the GitHub pages gem which provides you with the exact same versions used by GitHub to compile your site.

If you already have Ruby, the install part should be as easy as

gem install github-pages

Note that you will need Ruby headers (ruby-dev package on Ubuntu) in order to compile C dependencies.

On OS X, you can just type sudo gem install github-pages.

Now you can cd into your local clone of the repository and launch the compilation by

jekyll serve -w -b''

Your site will be generated in a _site sub-directory, and served live at http://localhost:4000/. Any changes to the sources will trigger an automatic recompilation!

Have fun!