This site is built with Jekyll, styled with Bootstrap and Bootswatch, and hosted on GitHub Pages. It is adapted from the Allan Lab academic group template, released under the MIT License.
Most routine updates only require editing a plain-text file in _data/:
| What | Where |
|---|---|
News items (home page + /allnews.html) |
_data/news.yml |
| Publications | _data/publist.yml |
| PhD students | _data/phd_students.yml |
| Master’s and undergraduate students | _data/master_students.yml |
| Alumni | _data/alumni_members.yml |
Page prose lives in _pages/. YAML is whitespace-sensitive, so match the indentation of the surrounding entries exactly and check the build after each change.
A few conventions specific to this site:
RIA Labpublist.yml, setting highlight: 1 promotes an entry to the Selected work grid on the publications page. Adding image: something.png (placed in images/pubpic/) shows a thumbnail; entries without an image render fine.news.yml appear in the home-page sidebar; the rest are on /allnews.html.photo: field render without an image, so people can be added before headshots exist. Headshots go in images/teampic/ and are square-cropped from the top by CSS, so any portrait aspect ratio works.images/slider7001400/ and uncomment the carousel block in _pages/home.md.The site’s identity — how it describes itself to Google and to anyone sharing a
link — is configured in one place, _config.yml:
| What | Where |
|---|---|
| Lab name, description, canonical URL | top of _config.yml |
| Department / school / university names and links | institution:, school:, department: |
| Director’s name, title, and scholarly identifiers | director: |
| Research topics used in metadata | research_areas: |
Those values feed three things automatically: the <title>, description, and
social-preview tags in _includes/head.html; the schema.org structured data in
_includes/structured-data.html, which tells search engines that the RIA Lab is
part of Indiana University and is directed by Michelle Zhao; and the identity
block rendered by _includes/director-card.html on the team page.
Two per-page front-matter keys are available:
description: — the meta description for that page. Write one per page; it is
often what Google shows underneath the link.seo_title: — overrides the <title> completely. Without it, the title is
built as <page title> | RIA Lab, Indiana University Bloomington.sitemap: false keeps a page out of sitemap.xml, and noindex: true asks
search engines not to index it; both are set on the 404 and this page. Everything
else is listed in sitemap.xml, which is generated on every build and pointed to
from robots.txt.
Colors and fonts live in _sass/_ria-variables.scss, imported ahead of the Bootstrap variables so its values win. The palette is Indiana University crimson (#990000), and type is set in Palatino with fallbacks for Windows, Linux, and Georgia. Layout tweaks that aren’t simple variable changes go in css/main.scss.
bundle install
bundle exec jekyll serve
Then open http://localhost:4000.