Building the Website

by Mathilda Shepard

Minimal computing principles guided web development for the Unclosure project. In the spirit of the public domain, we wanted our website to be as open and accessible as possible. Because static sites load well in low-connectivity environments and are easy to host accross a variety of platforms, we generated a static site using Jekyll and the Ed. theme designed by Alex Gil. Static sites are free to host on GitHub Pages and do not depend on complicated databases, content managment systems or proprietary software. You could even use No-Connect to serve your jekyll site on a USB drive for offline distribution through the sneakernet.

Amanda Visconti’s static site tutorial on The Programming Historian provides an excellent step-by-step guide for setting up your own Jekyll site. You can also consult the Jekyll Docs, tutorials and ProfHacker’s two-part article for more help building and understanding static websites.