Repository holding the sources of the FPSAC.org website (aka FPSAC.github.io)

Summary

The FPSAC website is hosted as a github page. In short, is built statically from plain text files with a wiki like syntax (Markdown) using Jekyll.

Getting started

To edit it this site, just modify the sources and push. Or simply click on the "Edit this page" button of each page.

Here are the main files of interest:

index.md: home page with short description
about.md: long description of what FPSAC is
executive.md: executive committee composition

Sources of the news and blog posts:

_posts/

Sources of the conference descriptions:

_confs/
public: folder contains
- favicon
- css folder
- posters of conferences
- thumbnail folder for the posters (these are built from the main directory using make thumbnails)

Main design goals

Easy collaborative edition by the FPSAC executive committee. This means allowing for:
- casual online edits with nothing but a web-browser and no technical knowledge requirement (similar to a wiki)
- offline edits with one's favorite editing/development tools, possibility to script stuff, ...
A nice concise syntax with a clear separation between content and layout. This includes in particular the possibility to generate automatically some pages from plain data. See e.g.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/FPSAC/FPSAC.github.io/master/_confs/fpsac-2015.md

for how each FPSAC is described
Robustness and ease of migration if needed.

Technology

The site is statically generated automatically (using Jekyll) from a set of plain text files with a wiki-like syntax (Markdown). The files are managed by the version control system git. Data is stored as plain text as well and easy to edit.

Hosting service

The site is hosted by github; I (Nicolas) am not a big fan of outsourcing stuff out on the clould. However the site holds no private information, github imposes no ownership transfer, and we could move away from it rather transparently if needed. So that should be ok. And this offers a comfortable service (high availability, account management, smooth integration, web editing with automatic site rebuild).

I still need to decide where to put the local clones of the official web sites. I am currently considering to just use another "large files" git repository on github.

The domain fpsac.org is registered at https://www.gandi.net/.

Old IP address: 193.55.63.80

Compiling the site locally

For more than the occasional editing, GitHub's editor and preview are limited. It can be more comfortable to work locally on one's computer.

Install ruby; on Ubuntu:

apt install ruby-dev ruby-bundler

Clone this repository, and go inside. Install jekyll and dependencies:

bundle install --path vendor/bundle

Compile the site and serve it locally

bundle exec jekyll serve -w

The 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.