Workshop Templates
My most re-used projects are a series of three workshop templates which have been adopted by hundreds of people to make workshop outlines, conference websites, lab websites, documentation, and other projects.
The idea is to provide a template repository with a basic Jekyll project set up with everything you need to start a simple website, designed for easy hosting on GitHub Pages (or anywhere).
Each repository is a template project –> to get started, make a copy and replace the demo with your own content and customizations. The content pages serve as documentation, models to follow, and examples to copy from. The user just needs to understand a bit about GitHub and how to edit Markdown–which you can learn while doing it!
Here are the three projects, in order of development:
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workshop-template (2017) - the original, built on the old Jekyll Minima theme, provides conventions to create nav and footer so that you can step through the workshop content.
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workshop-template-b (2018) - features a basic custom Bootstrap theme, includes to simplify adding Bootstrap components, and conventions to add features using front matter on each page (such as video, summaries, and topics).
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Learn-Static lesson-template (2021) - features a sidebar navigation with nested sections, providing clear structure for step by step content. It has an advanced search for quickly finding content. It is great for documentation.
I regularly use workshop-template-b and lesson-template for my teaching and documentation projects, so they are often updated with new versions of Bootstrap and other features. The assets are all self contained and complete, so once you make a copy, it requires no ongoing maintenance or dependencies.
All content is written using basic Markdown, making it simple to write, edit, and reuse lesson materials. The templates provides Liquid includes to simplify adding features to your pages.
Writing content in this simple, reuseable format makes for a better Open Educational Resource since anyone can make a copy and adapt–importantly, I find this means myself, I can easily re-use and adapt all the content I write for new purposes. I find this much easier than making slides!