This site is created based on a template provided by the Bedford Lab, the source code can be found here. Thank you Trevor Bedford and the Bedford Lab.

To build the website locally, clone the repo with:

git clone https://github.com/blab/blotter.git

Then install necessary Ruby dependencies by running bundle install from within the blotter directory. After this, the site can be be built with:

bundle exec jekyll build

(If you are getting errors at this stage, it may be due to your version of bundle. Try gem uninstall bundler + gem install bundler -v 1.13.1.)

To view the site, run bundle exec jekyll serve and point a browser to http://localhost:4000/. More information on Jekyll can be found here.

To include projects, preprocessing scripts are necessary to clone project repos and update Jekyll metadata. This can be accomplished with:

ruby _scripts/update-and-preprocess.rb

Then jekyll build works as normal.

Blog posts just require YAML top matter that looks something like:

---
layout: post
title: Newton Institute presentation
author: Trevor Bedford
link: http://www.newton.ac.uk/programmes/IDD/seminars/2013082213301.html
image: /images/blog/transmission.png
---

The layout, title and author tags are required, while link and image are optional. Just save a Markdown file with this top matter as something like blog/_posts/2013-08-27-newton-institute.md, where 2013-08-27 is the date of the post and newton-institute is the short title. This short title is used in the URL of the post, so this becomes blog/newton-institute/, so the short title should be long enough and unique enough not to cause conflicts with other posts.

• Look over the metadata format guide
• Look over the Markdown style guide