SCAN seminar web page

General design

For content management, I am using Jekyll a plain-text static site generator. The chief goal of using Jekyll is to separate the content from presentation, making it simpler to apply general stylistic changes in the future.

The main repository for the sources is on GitHub, but updates to the GitHub repository automatically trigger a remote script to rebuild the web pages and push them to the server.

Talk information

Talk posts are stored in the _posts subdirectory, and are named according to the usual Jekyll convention (YYYY-MM-DD-topic.extension). I default to using Markdown for formatting (extention .md). The YAML header should include title and speaker information, and the body contains the abstract:

---
title: A very important talk
speaker:
  name: David Bindel
  affil: CS, Cornell
  url: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~bindel
---

This is my abstract.  You should read [my paper][paper].

Joint work with A. Student.

[paper]: http://dx.doi.org/some/doi

The abstract may either be written in the text below the header or (if the speaker insists) it may be indicated in a separate abstract_url field in the header information.

To indicate that there is a break, there should be a talk post with the header information field break, e.g.

---
break: Spring Break
---

Semester schedule

Talk schedules are automatically populated from the _posts subdirectory based on the date. Talks between January and June are assumed to be associated with the spring schedule; talks from August to December are in the fall schedule.

The schedule pages have names of the form (for example) index-s17.md, and the header information

---
layout: schedule
semester: Spring
year: 2017
---

where the semester should be Spring or Fall. The text that follows introduces the seminar and gives the current meeting logistics. Add the header field nav: current to indicate that this is the schedule for the current semester. The current semester's schedule page should also be used as index.md.

The list of URLs for all semesters of the seminar is in _data/semesters.yml.

Style

The current site style is built on Bootstrap, a small set of responsive CSS modules from Yahoo. In this setting, "responsive" means that the site should adapt gracefully to different screen sizes and window sizes. The new design hues closely to the Bootstrap example pages.