Hydrology and Landscape Dynamics Lab — site source

A minimal Jekyll site, built from scratch with help from Claude.

Where to edit things

What you want to do	File to edit
Change the homepage hero image, headline, mission text, or "current directions" list	index.md
Add/edit a research topic and its publications	research.md (front matter topics: list)
Add a lab member	people.md
Edit teaching content	teaching.md
Edit opportunities/recruiting text	opportunities.md
Add a news update	new file in _news/ (see _news/README.md)
Add a new simple page (e.g. expand Lab values)	lab-values.md, software.md, or copy one of these as a template for a new page
Site title, email, GitHub Pages URL	_config.yml
Colors, fonts, spacing	assets/css/main.css (CSS variables at the top)

Every .md file above has comments in its front matter explaining the fields. You generally won't need to touch anything in _layouts/ or _includes/ unless you want to change the structure of a page type (e.g. how the research blocks are arranged), not just its content.

Adding a new top-level nav page

1. Create new-page.md at the root, copying the front matter pattern from lab-values.md (layout: default, a title:).
2. Add a link to it in _includes/nav.html -- either as a main tab or inside the "More" dropdown.

Photos

Drop images in assets/images/research/, assets/images/people/, or assets/images/news/ and point to them by path in the relevant front matter field (e.g. image: /assets/images/research/my-photo.jpg). Placeholder gray boxes are there until you do.

• Research/news thumbnails: roughly 4:3, at least 800px wide.
• People photos: square, at least 600px.
• Homepage hero: wide, at least 1600px, with enough contrast at the bottom-left for white text to sit on top of it.

Running locally

bundle install
bundle exec jekyll serve

Then visit http://localhost:4000.

Deploying to GitHub Pages

1. Push this repo to username.github.io (or any repo, with Pages enabled and built from this branch).
2. Update url: in _config.yml to match.
3. GitHub Pages will build it automatically using the github-pages gem specified in the Gemfile -- no extra build step needed.