About this site

This site was designed to serve as an agile and easy to maintain collaborative tool for the LuSEE Collaboration. Documents are developed and kept in the Markdown Syntax which is very human-readable and economical, being quite close to plain text. You may be familiar with this syntax if you ever had to edit README.md files on GitHub or similar documents elsewhere. The site is built using the static site generator technology, whereby a group of Markdown files are compiled into HTML and form a cohesive site. This results in enhanced site security and performance. Static site generation is implemented natively in the GitHub Pages framework i.e. sites are automatically generated and hosted if the respective repository is properly configured.

In addittion of text-based content there are options to filter, transform and render data content kept in formats such as YAML or CSV using the Liquid template language. This allows the developer to implement a modicum of database-like functionality without having the actual database.

Contributing to the site

GitHub

If you are interested in contributing to this site please contact the devloper for more information. Menu items and pages can be quickly added as needed. Once a section is set up, creation of material amounts to editing text files (at least in most basic cases). GitHub has now integrated the powerful VS Code editor into its web portal, which enables the users to do meaningful work e.g. modify and create content directly in the browser, without installing any software on their machine. Saving the content will result in automatic “commit/push” to the GitHub repository and automatic site refresh, which may take a couple of minutes.

Using your machine

Optionally, the user can install the Jekyll web site generator on their laptop or workstation which allows more flexibility in testing and experimentation. Expert users can also leverage the following components of the platform:

  • The Liquid template language which will help manuipulate and render structured data on web pages
  • The Bootstrap toolkit - for modifying layouts and appearance of these web pages and their behavior

Please take a look at the repository to get an idea of the general organization of the data, layouts and supporing logic. The idea is to shape the code and content in a way that is easy to navigate

Managing Data

Jekyll is flexible when it comes to storing and manipulating structured data. The data component of the site can reside in the “front matter” section of individual Markdown-formatted files or in separate YAML (or JSON, CSV etc) data sources. The former approach works well for small quantities of data. For scalability, it is recommended to rely mostly on dedicated data files (i.e. files in the “_data” folder) and keep the content of the front matter sections of individual MD files to a minimum.