At our March meeting we decided it would be a good idea to build our own website. The meetups page is fine for many things but we knew we were going to need a place to share more information about our projects and ideas.
We wanted something that was free, flexible, easy to learn and something that anyone could contribute towards.
We already have a group GitHub account, which like any GitHub account comes with free hosting on GitHub pages. This meant that we could push our changes directly through GitHub, keeping the updates simple and with the added benefit of making any update instantly visible to the whole team. This seemed like an obvious choice, the only drawback being that GitHub pages are set up for static sites and we wanted something that would be a little more dynamic and easy to manage.
Jekyll to the rescue.
Jekyll is a static website builder but comes with its own built-in development server, it uses a template engine called Liquid as well as a host of other features including added support for blog posts and pages.
Initially it looked like Jekyll wouldn’t run on Windows and that would be a problem for us. We didn’t want to exclude anyone and we couldn’t expect everyone to have Mac or Linux! Luckily however Windows is unofficially supported and we have been able to get Jekyll running on everyone’s machine.
For now we’re using Sass and Bootstrap 3 for styling and are consuming data from MeetupsAPI and Google Maps API.
It’s just the beginning and we’ve only really scratched the surface of what Jekyll offers.
Mark Horsell 3 April 2017