title	layout
Composition Help	base

Quick Links

• Live readme (with correct generation/commit info): http://public.vrac.iastate.edu/~jmvance/README.html

• Live web site: http://jenkins.vrac.iastate.edu/~jmvance/

• On-campus or VPN only:

  • Jenkins build job: https://jenkins.vrac.iastate.edu:8081/job/jmvance-web/

  • Latest build permalink: https://jenkins.vrac.iastate.edu:8081/job/jmvance-web/lastBuild/

• GitHub repository: https://github.com/vancegroup/jmvance-web

Help

This web site is generated using Jekyll, Liquid templating, and the Bootstrap basic HTML5 styles. The process is actually almost exactly like how GitHub Pages are generated, so pretty much all that documentation applies.

The source code for the site is kept at https://github.com/vancegroup/jmvance-web, and every push to GitHub triggers a rebuild. (The first update in a while will take a few minutes, as it has some waiting periods built in. Also, after detecting an update, there's a 1 minute quiet period while it waits to see if there will be other related changes coming in before building).

SparkleShare is useful for working on this site: see Ryan's blog post to get started.

Bibliographic data may be formatted using Jekyll-Scholar, which lets you simply include BibTeX citation code and have it formatted.

Timestamp

Yes, this section looks weird on GitHub. See the live readme above for it to make more sense

Generated {{ site.time | date_to_xmlschema }}

{% if site.commitid %} Most recent commit in generated site: {{ site.commitlinktext }}

{{ site.commitdesc }}

{% endif %}

Quick links

• Markdown cheatsheet
• Bootstrap
• Liquid template syntax
• Jekyll template data for Liquid
• Jekyll extensions to Liquid

How the web site is created

The raw files are processed by Jekyll: any file that starts with a block like the following, known as YAML Front Matter, will get transformed into the template. If this is missing, the page won't generate, and you'll be sad.

---

title: Composition Help

layout: base

---

(The blank lines help it look better on GitHub as a preview.)

You can use HTML directly, if you like, but I'd recommend Markdown - use file extension .mkd - which lets you do embedded HTML anyway for special functions (see the main index.mkd for an example). Also, it's good practice to create a new directory for each page and put just a single file index.mkd (plus any images, etc) in it, since this produces cleaner links.

Front matter elements

• title: required
• layout: required, is likely to be either base or research (for a research project page) right now.

research-layout only:

• subtitle: optional
• image: optional but recommended

Handy snippets to know

{% raw %}

• {{ site.vrac-link }} expands to a link that says Virtual Reality Applications Center {% endraw %}

TODO

• Port other top-level pages

• Search/replace all non-ASCII characters (word smart quotes/dashes, etc)

• Script a simple conversion that strips old header and footer from previous content and adds YAML front matter for Jekyll processing and templating.

• Consider these plugins:

  • oEmbed: https://gist.github.com/1455726

  • https://github.com/mrdanadams/jekyll-thumbnailer

  • Building custom bootstrap, etc. with https://github.com/matb33/jekyll-buildpack