#About this Website

This website has been built using the following components:

• Bootstrap - This provides the base CSS, fonts and javascript for the site.
• mmenu - This provides the nice sliding menu.
• Masonry - This is the library that arranges all of the boxes into a grid layout, and then reflows them whenever the screen size is changed.

In addition, the website is built using:

• GitHub - The entire website is version controlled and hosted in this repository. Each webpage is written in GitHub-flavoured markdown, in which there is a little embedded HTML. For example, you can view the markdown for this page here.
• Pandoc - I use Pandoc to convert the GitHub flavoured markdown into HTML5. Pandoc also has an in-built templating engine, allowing me to embed the markdown into my own custom template, which you can see here.
• Python - I have written a small Python script which uses Pandoc to convert all of the markdown files in the directories for the website into HTML5. The script works out the values needed by the template, creates skeletons for the menu (which I have hand-copied into a menu template), and then sorts out the menu selections and puts together each page.

You can create your own copy of this website by installing Python, Pandoc and git, and then cloning the site using the command;

git clone https://github.com/chryswoods/siremol.org.git

This will create a directory called siremol.org. Change into the chryswoods.com directory within this directory using;

cd siremol.org/chryswoods.com

You can then build the HTML for the website using;

python pandoc/convert_to_html.py .

If you only want to build the HTML for a specific directory, e.g. main, then type

python pandoc/convert_to_html.py main

You can then look at the HTML, e.g. open /path/to/siremol.org/chryswoods.com/index.html in your browser.

Hosting

This website is hosted in the UK using Xilo.net. I have used Xilo since 2006 and never had any problems. Their support staff are quick, very friendly and very supportive. Hosting is very inexpensive and, from experience of hosting large teaching sessions, I know that their servers can stand up to a heavy load. Xilo also handle all of my domain name registrations.

As mentioned above, version control for the website is hosted on GitHub. If you aren’t already using version control, then you should! GitHub or BitBucket both provide excellent hosting services and extra tools, and git is a pretty decent version control solution (say I, as a former CVS and SVN user…!).