Website Update
- Date Posted: Aug 14, 2019
The new website is finally, finally here!
…it’s taken a while to get here. In the last semester, when we were sitting down to meetings with our new committee, one of the things we said we wanted to focus on was communication with our members. After all, that’s the only real reason we’re here. But a complaint I’ve heard a lot is that there’s no way to really keep up with what we’re doing; so in response to that, I’ve been working on this new website, Lik Kan has been working on making our social media presence clearer and all of us are trying to make sure that everyone’s voice is heard and represented.
So what’s actually on this new and flashy website?
- Newsletter - This is our new blog post area, where we’ll post updates, such at this one! You’ll be able to read what we’ve been getting up to as a society, as being able to find out more information about our events.
- Calendar - We now have a calendar page! We organize a lot of events, and we’ve recently made a lot of changes to how we keep track of them. So now we have a new page on the webiste that lists all of them, all of the time.
- About - An about page - we can keep a list of social media we’re on as well as just some general information about the society.
- Committee - Probably my favourite part of the new site. Hopefully, by putting ourselves up there, it’s easier to reach out to us and know who we are!
We’re going to continue working on more stuff on this site and improving it more and more, but the main work is done now. If you’re interested in helping out, you can checkout the GitHub here.
Tech stack
So, now that’s out of the way, the fun part… the tech stack!
We used to have just a few static pages as HTML documents - but now we have a fully fledged Jekyll site! I’ve used Jekyll before in the past, but I’ve never written a theme from scratch, or used any of the more advanced features. So I got to learn a few new skills and can now comfortably use Jekyll!
(Disclaimer: Jekyll is awesome, and you should use it for everything on your webiste. All of the rest of this post is me going on about why Jekyll is great.)
Data files
Data files are super nifty, and let you use a collection of yaml files to insert content into the site. As the yaml’s much easier to edit and use, it’s easy to give to someone else to modify and re-use all across the site.
For example, before, we used to have to manually add new pages every time we wanted to add a redirect link; now, thanks to a clever hack, we can use jekyll to insert redirects from a yaml file into the javascript of our 404 page!
Themes
Writing a theme from scratch is interesting - when we went from the old site to the new one, there were already some stylesheets, but not particularly organized. The very first task I looked at was to cleanup the CSS* and move it in SCSS.
There’s only one problem with using SCSS - it makes going back to normal CSS* frustrating. Thanks to that, we’re able to have easy-to-read and hopefully easy-to-edit style sheets.
Conclusion
That’s probably enough about that.
Hopefully you all enjoy our new website!
Justin
* Here we mean Cascading Style Sheets, not Computer Science Society