flannaghan.com

The Jekyll source for https://flannaghan.com — a personal site with a blog, a few interactive tools, publications and talks, and a cycling section with mapped routes and elevation profiles.

Build requirements

Firstly, the system packages:

sudo dnf install jekyll gpsbabel python3-gpxpy python3-numpy python3-scipy python3-matplotlib

Then the ruby packages:

gem install gpx
gem install jekyll-sitemap

gpsbabel and the Python packages are needed by the cycling route plugin (see below), which runs on every build — the build fails without them. The plugin shells out to python, not python3, so that name has to resolve.

Building and publishing

Preview locally with live reload on http://localhost:4000:

jekyll serve

To build and push to production:

./build_and_publish.sh

That does a jekyll clean && jekyll build, then rsyncs _site/ to the lightsail host (configure it in ~/.ssh/config).

The rsync does not use --delete. Anything published once stays on the server forever, even after it is deleted here. If you remove or rename a page, delete the old file on the server by hand as well, or it will keep serving at its old URL.

Equally, anything that lands in _site gets served publicly at the site root. When adding files to the top level of the repo, check whether they belong in the exclude list in _config.yml.

Layout

Path	What it is
_posts/	Blog posts, YYYY-MM-DD-slug.md or .html.
_layouts/	default, post, tag_list, and bikeroute for cycling routes.
_includes/	Page head and the main navigation bar.
_plugins/	Custom Jekyll plugins, see below.
_data/	navigation.yml drives the menu; also publications and talks.
cycling/	Cycling section — routes, KML sources, generated GPX and elevation plots.
assets/, css/, js/	Static files, including vendored Bootstrap and Plotly.
test/	Scratch pages, published but unlinked.

Posts are listed on /postlist_full.html. Adding tags: [tool] to a post also lists it on /postlist_tools.html; the tag_list layout generates a page per tag this way. Posts under the cycling category are kept out of the main blog list.

The menu is built from _data/navigation.yml, which is just a list of URLs — each entry picks up its label from the target page's menutitle or title.

Plugins

• procroute.rb — the cycling route pipeline. For each page under cycling/routes/, it reads the matching KML in cycling/kml/, converts and simplifies it with gpsbabel, and writes a GPX file. It then pipes the route data to procroute.py, which uses numpy/scipy/matplotlib to render the elevation profile images into cycling/alt/. Both source directories are excluded from the build output.
• strip.rb — a {% strip %} Liquid block that collapses blank lines, used to keep the generated nav markup tidy.
• experimental.py — a scratch script for elevation experiments. Not part of the build.

Notes

Comments were removed in 2017 when the third-party service behind them (pooleapp) shut down. The 2015 post about setting them up is kept as a matter of record, but none of the machinery remains.