ELIXIR Beacon Project website

The main information site for the ELIXIR Beacon Project - i.e. the formatted content of this repository - can be accessed as Beacon website.

For more information about the project you may also consult the corresponding ELIXIR website.

Website Technology

The website is built from this repository using the Github-provided support for the Jekyll build system, using a combination of HTML and Markdown files and embedded Liquid markup. After adding or editing a post in the master branch, the corresponding website is auto-updated using Github's built-in Jekyll engine.

Apart from special setup and modification procedures (adding collation pages for new categories or tags; layout modifications), most site management consists of adding Markdown pages to the _posts directory - see below.

Note: One can easily test the site locally using the instructions provided here. These can also be used to move the site project to a local built system with transfer of the generated pages to a standard webserver, independent of Github (see e.g. info.baudisgroup.org).

Managing posts

=> The easiest way to create a new post is to copy and modify an old one from the same category. <=

In the Jekyll framework used for this site, new web pages are created by adding Markdown pages to this (i.e. _posts) directory.

These pages have to fulfil 2 conditions:

• they need a YAML front matter
• their names start with the ISO8601 formated date of the post
  • the date can be any date, you want the post to be associated with (e.g. 1967-11-11)
  • the date can be in the future, with posts then only being processed
    • when this date is reached, or
    • if the future: true flag is set in _config.yml
  • the leading date has to be followed by a dash - sign (e.g. 2018-10-19-news-weather-is-nice.md)

Posts can be arranged into sub-directories (e.g. /_posts/news/2018-10-19-news-weather-is-nice.md); this has no impact at all and can be used for keeping some order.

Front Matter

A typical YAML front matter looks like this:

---
title: Coordinate use for Beacon Queries
date: 2018-10-17
layout: default
author: '@github_user_name'
excerpt_separator: <!--more-->
www_link: 'beacon.progenetix.org'
category:
  - howto
tags:
  - queries
  - definitions
  - FAQ
---

With the attributes:

• title
  • standard, recommended
  • the title of the page, as it will show up in navigation etc. (so better concise)
  • frequently re-used in the documents; e.g. ## {{ page.title }} will insert an <h2> wrapped version of the title into the page
  • tricky with special characters...
• date
  • ISO8601 date (see example)
  • will override the date in the filename
  • not strictly needed (since the Jekyll page.date variable can be derived from the filename)
• author
  • optional, recommended
  • the Github user name of the page's creator
  • will auto-link to the https://github.com/github_user_name/ page, if starting with an "@"
  • @github_user_name has to be quoted or the page won't build!
  • names w/o "@" won't link
• author_link:
  • add this to provide a full, quoted address for e.g. the author's home page
    • author_link: 'https://info.baudisgroup.org/group/Michael_Baudis/'
  • only works for non-"@" author names (otherwise -> Github)
• layout: default
  • needed for processing the page into the html template
  • default can be replaced with another value from /layouts/
• excerpt_separator
  • optional but recommended
  • the corresponding value (i.e. <!--more-->) can then be inserted into the page code, to limit the amount of page content showing in list views
• www_link
  • private tag
  • will lead to the insertion of a "[www]" tag at the end of the page, with corresponding link
• category
  • standard, recommended
  • will add the page to the category, which should be one of the navigation_categories defined in _config.yml
  • usually only one value, but multiple are possible (better use tags)
• tags
  • standard, recommended
  • well, tags; pages will then be listed on the collections linked from the corresponding tag cloud value
  • CAVE: landing pages for non-existing tags have to be added first to /tags/ (just copy & re-name directory there)