What is this?
This is a GitHub Pages website, hosted at GitHub.com in an organizational repository. This repository is an organization on GitHub setup under the administration of Jon Griffith, whose GitHub main repo is found at https://github.com/arretx/.
Jekyll
GitHub Pages uses Jekyll to build static websites that are very quick to load, minimizing the wait times to get to the information you need.
Jekyll sites contain both ‘pages’ and ‘posts’ as well as most of the other assets any website might contain, like documents and images, reference to external resources, etc.
This site is no different.
Location of Files
The current file structure of the site can be observed at the main repository, https://github.com/NewValleyChurch/NewValleyChurch.github.io.
Jekyll Theme
The theme that is being used to publish the content on the site was originally written by Tom Johnson and can be found here. It has been vastly modified since it was originally forked.
Tools used to manage this site:
This site is currently edited using a text editor called Atom, with a cloned version stored on a laptop. Pages are edited offline and tested offline. When they are functional offline, they are pushed to the live server and will be available to view. The main repository is kept in sync with the remote repository with a tool called GitHub Desktop, which is configured to access the GitHub repository. GitHub desktop makes it possible to keep all of the files synchronized and up to date.
Notes about some of the data:
While quite a bit of the site is static information that won’t change over time, there is quite a bit of data that is often updated and changed. That data includes the news feeds and many of the tables containing lists.
Right now, a majority of the data in the tables are drawn from the ‘data’ folder in the repository, but the source of the data in those files is found in a shared Google Spreadsheet.
[more to come]