About This Website

This website was built with Twitter Bootstrap and Jekyll.

Twitter Bootstrap

Bootstrap is a front-end library made by Twitter that aims to make front-end development easier and faster. It contains many HTML and CSS templates for grids, buttons, forms, typography, etc as well as JavaScript extensions for interactivity.

This website uses Bootstrap for its easy-to-use responsive grid system (on the projects and lectures page) as well as the responsive navigation bar on top. Responsive design in a nutshell means developing a web page to be accessible across a wide range of devices, from desktop computers to tablets and mobile phones. Try resizing your browser window to see responsive design in effect!

We don't allow you to use Bootstrap in this class because we want you to learn the foundations of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. However, after you graduate from this class, feel free to use Bootstrap for any projects or future work. Once you have a solid foundation, libraries are great shortcuts for enabling faster web development and rapid prototyping.

Learn more about Bootstrap on their website.

Jekyll

Jekyll is a templating engine used to transform plain text and markdown into static web pages.

In a nutshell, you can define your own page layouts and resuable components. Every time you create a new page or update an existing page, Jekyll's engine will compile everything into static pages that are ready to be deployed. This means no more going through all of your html files and copying/pasting each time you make a change to your layout. Jekyll does all the templating work for you.

Many of you will most likely want to build your own personal website, blog, or portfolio. Jekyll is the engine behind GitHub Pages, which means you can use Jekyll in combination with GitHub Pages' free hosting and custom domain name service to do so.

Learn more about Jekyll on their website.