How to Update the Website

Oct 26, 2023

Today we are going to update the website becaues I’m sick of being the only one that updates it so I’m making you guys help me.

I will try to make this as beginner friendly as possible. I also had the clever idea of having you guys help me modify this page as the first exercise, because I’m that lazy.

Also to make sure everyone is not overwhelmed, we will focus on updating this website, which I guess means that this is a really bad name for the workshop, because it wil mostly be more maintaining as opposed to making your own website.

Prerequisites

A GitHub account
A computer

Terminology

Website this is what happens when you go to the full website. Note that this is different from the repo, which is the code which will build the website
repo where your code is, short for repository
fork with git, everyone makes a copy, your own copy is called a fork, if you change your copy it won’t cahnge the website, I have to merge it in
file this is the thing that you click on in a folder. Most of the files on the website is called markdown, and it ends in md.
markdown markdown is a special type of file that is very similar to regular plain text, but you have some special syntax for bold, italic and links.
Jekyll normally, basic websites are built using technologies using html, css, and javascript. However, github offers this thing called Jekyll that allows you to write your website in mostly markdown. THat’s why most of the code looks like normal writing.

Updating our particular website

How to do it the way you are not supposed to do it.

Use this method if you see that I can’t spell correctly or have horrible grammar or I said something you don’t like and you want to remove it and you can’t be bothered to learn git.

Find page you want to change on the git repo

This involves using the search on github and finding the file.

Click the edit file on the top right, it looks like a pencil

Do your changes

Commit your changes and try to give a useful description of what you did

click pull request

give a summary of your pull request or leave it blank like bad person

click submit pull requeest

wait for somone to merge it

Using github desktop

This method is more educational for you because it wil teach you how to use the github workflow, while also providing a graphic interface if you are not ready for the command line.

Download github desktop

Use VS code or another text editor to edit the flie

Use github desktop to commit

Use github desktop to push

Sbmit a pull request using the website

wait for someone to merge it in

How I do it

I use emacs, so I can edit the file, save, add, commit, and push by mashing random buttons on my keyboard. I do not recommend you learn emacs unless you have no life.

Updating your own website

Github offers every account a free corresponding static website. This will be yourusername.github.io

If you make your repo that name, it will automitaclly try to serve it to the website.

To start out, you can copy all of our file on our website and modify it. Or you can also follow github’s guide.

Exercise

To see what you learned, try contributing to this page. Either fix a typo, expand a section, or add an image.