Shawn Graham

Associate Prof of Digital Humanities @electricarchaeo - research blog at electric archaeology - open notebook at shawngraham.github.io - office at PA 406 - email at shawn dot graham at carleton dot ca - Office hours by chance or arrangement

About this site

This site is powered by PyKwiki (see below)

Icons are from the Noun Project:

Other images:

Workflow

This site is a static site generated using the python package 'PyKwiki'. Individual files are written in markdown format. Then, at the command line, I run $ python pywkiki cache -f which reads all of my markdown files and turns them into static html. These html files are then synced to a github repository on the gh-pages branch. That branch is configured using a CNAME file to point to the subdomain I registered for this course, grad.craftingdigitalhistory.ca. That subdomain is similarly configured with a CNAME entry via the cpanel to point back to shawngraham.github.io. This way, instead of futzing with ftp, I use version control to keep everything in sync. This also has the happy side effect that you can fork a copy of this site for your own reference.

I've used wordpress blogs in the past for course websites, and these work well enough. But I've become disenchanted with the Wordpress interface, and I rather like the idea of writing once, deploying everywhere. When I write in markdown, the plain text files stay with me and I can use pandoc to convert them to whatever else I need. The other thing is, these files will always remain machine readable, whatever Microscoft or Apple do.

You, too, will learn how to do this.