Site Ideas

[toddgrotenhuis]

Considering options for things to put on the site in addition to a link to the meetup:

• Member links or bios
• Member projects
• Suggestion box for topics
• Short description of standard events

Could take some ideas from this: http://indystartuplab.org/

Alternatively, we could set some Jekyll (or Hyde) to host member posts about things they are doing with python, or things they are learning.

Thoughts?

[claytron]

We could organize a hack day to get something put together. We all just learned about these great web frameworks! One option could be Pinax, which I think handles a lot of this stuff by combining a bunch of Django add-ons together. Maybe there is some newer hotness that does it better?

I was also thinking about using a static site generator, then spent more time looking at all the different ones than actually getting something done. Could be a quick option, but I don't know how well it would work in a group setting since I've never used any of them for real.

[btbytes]

All the above can be achieved with a static site generator like Jekyll which Github supports through http://pages.github.com/ To add a new page/blog post, all that one has to do is create a markdown/html page and push the changes to github. With the "add a new file" + edit online feature, there is no need to even checkout the code to make changes to the site once it is pushed.

The "Suggestion Box" feature can be implemented using a commenting system ala disqus or intensedebate (i've no strong opinions except that I'd lean towards a commenting system with github login support).

not doing beats doing (for the same results, of course) ;)

[btbytes]

Also, i've used this setup (Jekyll + github) for couple of sites (a code blog and a recipe blog for my wife) and works quite swimmingly..

[btbytes]

I threw together the first proto using jekyll and bootstrap. the code is on the indypy.org repo and the test web link: http://test.btbytes.com/

[swanson]

Hi guys, stumbled upon this repo. We use github pages for the IndySA page (https://github.com/indy-software-artisans/indy-software-artisans.github.com). We've got some javascript to pull in meeting summaries/dates from meetup (that we borrowed from IndyRb) that might be helpful to you guys.

https://github.com/indy-software-artisans/indy-software-artisans.github.com/blob/master/static/site.js#L20

We also ran into some features that weren't easy with a static site generator, like adding a Contact Form for sponsor inquiry. We built a small heroku app for sending emails (src here: https://github.com/indy-software-artisans/jekyll-mailer) and I would recommend that approach over trying to shoe-horn things like Disqus - it also makes a great small project for other members to contribute to.

Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions. I also run http://indystartuplab.org/ on Jekyll/GH-Pages.