vanderveer.io

Personal blog of Matthijs van der Veer, built with Jekyll and hosted on GitHub Pages.

Local Development

bundle install
bundle exec jekyll serve

Visit http://localhost:4000 to preview the site.

Keeping Sessionize data fresh

The about page reads from _data/sessionize.yml, which is a snapshot of: https://sessionize.com/api/speaker/json/32v3odtbr8

Two ways to refresh it:

Manual. From the repo root:

./jekyll/scripts/fetch-sessionize.sh

Commits the updated YAML; next build picks it up.

Automatic (recommended). Add a step to your GitHub Actions Pages workflow before the Jekyll build:

- name: Refresh Sessionize data
  run: ./jekyll/scripts/fetch-sessionize.sh

Every deploy then pulls fresh sessions + events. Note: GitHub Pages' default build doesn't run custom steps; you'll need a pages.yml workflow that does actions/configure-pages → fetch script → jekyll build → actions/deploy-pages.

The about page splits events into Upcoming (end-date ≥ today) and Past (end-date < today) automatically, using site.time — so you never need to manually move an event between sections.

Preview

Open Vertical Descent.html (sibling to this folder) for a static preview rendered with your real post titles and dates.