694's new website

[Kevin Wang]

This year our Web Team has redesigned our website from scratch. Our new website is completely static, built on Jekyll, and served by GitHub Pages. Take a look!

http://stuypulse.com/

In classic Stuypulse manner, we have of course made our entire website open source. You can find the source here. List of contributors here.

The style is built off of Bootstrap, but as developers we hate Bootstrap so we tried to make it look as un-Bootstrappy as possible.

Questions and comments are welcome!

[ENeyman]

It looks like one of the links on the bottom of the page is broken. FIRSTConnect.Us does not seem to lead anywhere.

Overall, great, clean layout.

[Kevin Wang]

We're working on that. The domain was registered under an alumni member's account rather than the team, so it recently expired without warning so we're working on getting the site back online.

[jblay]

If you are clever and survey the site, you can find some stuff on this years robot a little early.

[darkember]

Looking good.

[synth3tk]

I like that it uses Bootstrap, but doesn't immediately scream "I'M USING BOOTSTRAP!!!". Well done.

[runneals]

WOW! I'm impressed! I bet you guys learned a lot from developing your site! Something that you need to improve is the load time. I'm at school (we have a 60 meg fiber line) and it took awhile for your page to load (it looked like it was grabbing some assets for your css stuff). A great learning experience, but the thing now is, do you have members to sustain it after you leave? for this reason alone, I chose Wordpress. What are you guys using as your backend?

Great job!
-David

[Hotontherim]

Your website looks good! The color scheme is simple, everything is well-organized, and I like the floating menu. (:

[Kevin Wang]

Originally Posted by runneals

WOW! I'm impressed! I bet you guys learned a lot from developing your site! Something that you need to improve is the load time. I'm at school (we have a 60 meg fiber line) and it took awhile for your page to load (it looked like it was grabbing some assets for your css stuff). A great learning experience, but the thing now is, do you have members to sustain it after you leave? for this reason alone, I chose Wordpress. What are you guys using as your backend?

Great job!
-David

Thanks! We have a bunch of developers (at least five in the web team alone, plus at least a dozen robot programmers) who will be qualified to run the site in the future. Our team's programming division uses Git and GitHub for all of our development, so learning the workflow for site development doesn't require much additional training.

Since it's a static site being served by GitHub, the page should load very very quickly (compare to our old site. According to this StackExchange post:

They use replication, clustering and load balancing to provide low latency and hight availability and I would say they are pretty good at doing that.

Therefore, the load time must have been due to the Typekit fonts that get downloaded upon the first visit to the site.

Furthermore, since the site is 100% static, there actually is no backend. Everything on the website exists somewhere in the source code. The only time the server needs to do anything other than serve static files is to recompile the site using Jekyll every time we push new commits to origin/master. New blog posts are added by creating new files in the _posts/ directory.

[runneals]

Originally Posted by Kevin Wang

Therefore, the load time must have been due to the Typekit fonts that get downloaded upon the first visit to the site.

Furthermore, since the site is 100% static, there actually is no backend. Everything on the website exists somewhere in the source code. The only time the server needs to do anything other than serve static files is to recompile the site using Jekyll every time we push new commits to origin/master. New blog posts are added by creating new files in the _posts/ directory.

That's cool! To make our site run faster, and super secure, we use cloudflare as our CDN "front door" to cache pages. We also just turned on the new fast web standard "Railgun", so hopefully our pages will load faster then they have in the past, which was just as fast too

That's an interesting way to update blog posts. Very cool!

Keep up the good work!