Working with GH Pages & Jekyll

Setting Up a GH-Pages via Jekyll

When setting up Project Site, GH Pages gives you an option to either make the site from scratch or use a template. Initially, we chose to use a template and started our project by providing our backstory in the README to introduce our intentions to the community. This allowed interested visitors to read our content presented in a human-friendly format (via markdown). In order to start building out our homepage and prominently show our map and data, we completed the following steps:

Modified the _config.yml

• tell the Jekyll app what files to exclude. We wanted to store our data in this repo but keep it out of the way until we had an appropriate UI to present it.
• create variables for the app's meta data. Information like 'title' and 'description' are stored here; any future changes would only need to take place here- no need to hunt down all the places where these might be rendered
• build out the _layouts/default.html. This is the wrapper that gives the site the general look and feel.
• include an index.html at the project root. If you do not have this, GH-Pages will default to showing your README.

When Jekyll builds your site, it will generate files in a _site/ directory. You can preview that but you should not edit it directly.

*As you are building, run bundle exec jekyll serve from your terminal to preview your changes locally before you push to Github