Webpage for BE262, Physical Biology Bootcamp at Caltech

Rob Phillips Group

https://www.rpgroup.caltech.edu/be262/

How to update/archive website material

Say we're in year 20XX. To make a new year's offering course webpage for the new year 20XX+1:

1. First, archive the current/old year's index.html page. Do this by making a new directory called the current year, '20XX', and copying the current index.html file held at the top level of this be262 directory into the new directory. (The logic of the whole webpage is that whatever index.html is found at the top level is the one served by github pages to visitors to the webpage without a year suffix.)
   • Note: not essential to get a functional 20XX+1 page up and running, but: to properly archive the old websites so references are intact, you must also copy the contents of _site/20XX/ into the _site/20XX+1 folder.
2. Next, edit the index.html file still at the top level of be262 to indicate the new year, by changing year: 20XX to year: 20XX+1.
3. Now, go to the _posts directory. This directory contains the majority of files you would be updating the content of that comprise the website (eg those About, People, Programming, and Readings links that populate the left side of the webpage). The webpage framework essentially expects a structure like a blog, so each of the Markdown files in _posts contains a date. These dates are arbitrary, except for the fact that the current year's posts must all have the current numerical year correctly specified. So, copy the old/current year's posts---namely, eg 20XX-01-24-readings.md, 20XX-01-25-code.md, and so on---into new versions that are renamed with the new year, e.g. 20XX+1-01-24-readings.md, etc. Next, inside each of these year 20XX+1 post .md files, edit anything that says the old 20XX year into 20XX+1: e.g. at the minimum the tag: and year: attributes at the top of each of the files. But also, for e.g. the 20XX+1-01-24-code.md file, you'll need to edit a mention in site.data.20XX.speakers to site.data.20XX+1.speakers, etc.
4. That last edit recommends that under _data, there will be expected to be a directory with each year where info is to be found. So, cd into _data and copy the old year 20XX directory into a new directory named 20XX+1.
5. Edit these _data/20XX+1 files accordingly to reflect the new schedule of speakers, the new TA's, any mugshots, etc. Add any new people/speaker mugshots to be262/images/people/ so you can call them in files found in _data/20XX+1; remember that it is strongly recommended that all images are square in aspect ratio to prevent formatting weirdness.
6. Update anything else with new materials! Remember to commit etc.

Notes about website logic

• To update information, most of the time you'll modify the entries in this year's appropriate _posts, or the data files automatically consulted in _data/20XX+1. Git committing should result in a Github page build that is indicated by a little yellow dot (denoting pending compilation) that turns to a green checkmark next to your commit status in the main repo page, indicating that the changes have propagated to the live webpage.
• Jekyll automatically compiles the contents of _site, so do not directly edit the .html files found in this folder (except for perhaps copying into older year directories), because these changes won't reflect in compiling the github page upon every commit. Instead, update the relevant files in _posts or in the top level be262 directory.