Website for Eau de Web
This website is generated using Jekyll with the source code managed as a Git repository. A draft version is hosted on github and the public version is on eaudeweb.ro.
Content organization
Content is taken from any file with the .markdown extension. There are
a few standalone pages, e.g. index.markdown for the homepage and
news/2010.markdown for the 2010 news archive. Other pages are taken
from blog-like lists of posts, for example news/_posts. Each Markdown
page has a YAML front matter, some metadata that describes the page:
title, name of layout template (see below), perhaps the path of a logo
or icon.
The _posts folders are useful for news items, but also for managing
many pieces of similar content: the sections of the homepage and the
list of clients. Let's call them "fake posts". Jekyll wants every post
to have a date, so our fake posts are dated "1 January 2000". They also
have a "date" value in their YAML front-matter so we can change the sort
order without renaming files. Each fake post results in a page;
sometimes this is useful (list of clients), sometimes not (sections of
the homepage) - but we just ignore them.
Layout
All pages are rendered using templates found in the _layout folder. A
fair amount of transformation and organization happens in there,
especially on the homepage. Static resources are copied unmodified by
Jekyll.
Making changes
To change any aspect of the site, edit the relevant files, then re-run
Jekyll. For quick changes to an existing file, GitHub has a built-in
editor. For a more friendly experience one can use Cloud9: create an
account, import the github repository
(git@github.com:eaudeweb/eaudeweb.github.com.git), make some changes,
then, from the bottom console, run: git add ., git commit -m "edit content", git push (feel free to replace "edit content" with a more
useful explanation). The code is sent to GitHub, which will re-generate
the draft website, so you can see the results.
For a more efficient editing experience, install Jekyll locally, and
start it in the background with jekyll serve; it will serve
the website on port 4000 and automatically pick up any changes.
Deployment
A Jekyll site is a collection of static files, so it can be served straight from the filesystem by a web server like Apache.
To update the server:
- Log in to the webserver(ssh eaudeweb.ro)
- su -
- cd /var/local/edw-website
- git pull
- jekyll --user=production
If you have an error like "Could not find a JavaScript runtime" when you build you should install a javascript runtime library like nodejs