Our previous website had its time in the sun and we're grateful for it being the public face of our research group, but we admittedly haven't done a very good job updating it. The website was also vendor-locked into the service we were using to manage and host it.
The internet has changed a lot in the years since we created the original website, and there have been some pretty significant improvements in static site generators, which are the kinds of software, often open-source, that take a series of statically written documents (e.g. Markdown), and bind them into very snappy websites. These are often what software documentation is built from, but they can also be adapted for some really nice websites, especially using free templates open-source web developers have kindly created. We hope this new direction makes the lab website pleasing to browse and (for us) easier to maintain and modify. At the very least, we are all very excited about it and look forward to reinvesting in our public portal.
This website was built using:
- Zola: a static-site generator built using Rust
- Vonge: a Zola port of the Hugo/Jekyll theme
- GitHub and GitHub Actions: Hosts and builds/deploys the website
We are deeply grateful to the open-source community for their commitment to a free and open source world, and we look forward to putting our best foot forward!
