Visual Computing @ IST Austria

The website for IST Austria's Visual Computing group was developed using Jekyll and is hosted on GitHub Pages. Whenever a file is added, deleted or changed, the website is recompiled into a set of static files. You can edit and create files directly through the GitHub web interface. Unfortunately, uploading cannot be done through the web interface, but GitHub provides very easy-to-use software for both Windows and Mac. You are, of course, also free to use your favorite Git client.

Local updates

For small updates, you can just use the web interface to edit the website as described above. For larger updates it is recommended to edit the website locally. For this, you need to install Jekyll. With Jekyll installed, just run the following command.

jekyll serve --watch

This will start a web server on port 4000, which will watch for any changes and regenerate the website automatically. Just point your web browser to http://localhost:4000 and off you go! When you are happy with your changes, just commit the changes to GitHub.

Add a piece of news

Adding news is accomplished by editing _data/news.yml.. As the file extension suggests, the file is written in YAML, a file format similar to JSON or Windows INI files. Contents is furthermore parsed as Markdown, so you easily add markup like *emphasis* and [links](http://example.com).

Add a new person

To add a new person, create a new file with extension .md in _people/ (note the underscore). The naming convention for the filename is the full name without spaces, so for example chriswojtan.md. A typical example looks as follows.

---
# mandatory fields
id: chriswojtan # same as the filename but without the .md extension
name: Wojtan, Chris
type: faculty # one of [faculty, assistant, postdoc, phdstudent, intern, alumni]
    grp: wojtan # one of [bickel, lampert, kolmogorov, wojtan]

# optional fields
room: Central Building, 3rd floor
phone: +43 (0)2243 9000-xxxx
email: xxxx@ist.ac.at
topics: Computer Graphics
webpage: http://example.com # personal webpage
bio: |
  Chris Wojtan is a professor at IST Austria since 2016. He received a
  PhD in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in 2010.
    coaffiliate: [Name of other group]
    coaffiliateurl: [Link to the other group]
---

Make sure to include --- both at the beginning and end of the file. Some editors (Notepad, I am looking at you!) like to add a UTF Byte Order Mark to text files. This causes problems, since --- must be the very first thing in the file, so be aware of this.

You probably also want a picture for the person. This picture should be in JPEG format and should be placed in people/ (without underscore) with a name that matches the .md file in _people/ and extension .jpg. For the example above, the picture would be saved to people/chriswojtan.jpg. Please make sure to crop the picture to a reasonable size before uploading it.

Add a new publication

To add a new publication, create a new file with extension .md in _publications/YEAR/ (note the underscore). The naming convention is to use the first letter of each word in the title of the publication. For instance, if the name of the publication is Parameterization with Coordinates the filename should be PwC.md.

A minimal example of a publication follows.

---
title: Water Wave Animation via Wavefront Parameter Interpolation

authors:
  - name: Jeschke, Stefan
  - name: Wojtan, Chris
    id: chriswojtan
    url: https://pub.ista.ac.at/~wojtan/

publication: ACM Transactions on Graphics 34(3)
date: 2015-05-01

    grp: wojtan
paper: http://pub.ista.ac.at/group_wojtan/projects/2015_Jeschke_WWAvWPI/wavefront_preprint.pdf
project: http://pub.ista.ac.at/group_wojtan/projects/2015_Jeschke_WWAvWPI/index.html
---

This will create a publication without a publication with an external project page. If you would like an internal project page, you additionally set the layout to publication as follows.

---
layout: publication
title: "Putting Holes in Holey Geometry: Topology Change for Arbitrary Surfaces"

...

---

# {{ page.title }}

Anything on the project page goes here.

Anything after the last --- shows up as the contents of the project page. The format is Markdown, which should be easy enough to edit. We recommend looking at a more complete example for inspiration on how to design the project page.

Thumbnails should be saved as publications/YEAR/PUBLICATION/thumb.jpg (no underscore), for example publications/2015/PwC/thumb.jpg. Again, please make sure you crop the picture to a reasonable size before uploading it.

Large files such as preprints or videos should not be uploaded to GitHub! We are still working on a more systematic approach to handling such large files, but for now, please store them at your IST website (http://pub.ista.ac.at/~yourusername).

It is possible to add comments, which are not shown on the final web page, to Markdown pages with

[comment]: # (ADD TEXT OF THE COMMENT HERE)

as explained in this StackOverflow answer.

FAQ

The website is not updating when I make edits or push changes

This most commonly happens if your e-mail address is not verified. Other reasons can be found in the troubleshooting section on GitHub.

How do I install Jekyll on Windows?

Apparently, this can be an enormous pain. Portable Jekyll seems to be an easy solution though.

How do I install Jekyll on Mac OS X?

$ gem update --system
$ gem install jekyll

How do I install Jekyll on Debian/Linux?

$ aptitude install jekyll

istaustria/istaustria.github.io