TEDxPurdueU Main Website

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Static site at tedxpurdueu.com.

Sections

1. Technologies
2. Installation
3. Server administration
4. Other notes

Technologies

Because our web application hosts mostly static content, until such time as we need more dynamic data interactions, we're using static pages for the main site at tedxpurdueu.com and serving static JSON at the API endpoints for mobile applications.

Our stack is pretty vanilla, using jQuery where it's convenient, unless performance is desired. Our JavaScript is a mix of vanilla and jQuery, preferring vanilla, but preferring code readability over purity. We use Nginx on the server as a reverse proxy and for serving static sites, and we use SCSS to keep our styles clean. Finally, we use CloudFlare as a CDN to keep our site fast, take care of some caching, and for simple, set-it-and-forget-it TLS.

Installation

We use gulp to manage our build process. Just run gulp build from the root directory to generate all the necessary assets after changes. This runs:

• compile-styles, which compiles all our styles into a single file
• compile-scripts, which minifies and concatenates all of our custom scripts into a single file,
• compile-libs, which minifies and concat's our client-side dependencies

Server administration

Our domain, tedxpurdueu.com, is registered with Google Domains with CloudFlare acting as the CDN and DNS.

Both our static web server and our JSON (mobile application backend) server are hosted on an Ubuntu server on DigitalOcean. For access to the server, please contact the current TEDxPurdueU technology lead.

We have two versions of the site, staging.tedxpurdueu.com and [www.]tedxpurdueu.com. the staging subdomain is used as a beta / staging version. Currently, both versions pull from the same master branch, and the production version is migrated over directly from the source version on the server with a simple shell script rather than pulling down from GitHub.

Other notes

• Our image files are named very haphazardly. We're going to point the finger here to nobody in particular, but mostly, this is a consequence of our site migrating from WordPress to a custom solution. Since WordPress dosn't give a hoot about how files are named on upload, this happens. We deal with it.

• When you add / change anything on this repository, or on the server infrastructure, please please please leave documentation of it. It helps the sysadmins who change from year to year (season to season) adjust quickly and start out on the right foot.

• Galleries (denoted by .gallery and .gallery-item elements) are floated (sorta) in non-JS environments and laid out with the masonry technique when we can use the masonry.js JavaScript library. It has a dead simple API and works well for our current setup -- lightweight and single-purpose.