Mandadapu Group at UC Berkeley

A plain Jekyll site designed for a clean, old-school academic group page. It uses a shared layout with includes and minimal CSS. No third-party themes or plugins are used.

Approach

• Plain Jekyll layouts + includes (_layouts/default.html, _includes/nav.html).
• Minimal, readable CSS in assets/style.css.
• Two-column layout with a left navigation sidebar.

Structure

• _config.yml contains only the essential site settings.
• _layouts/default.html defines the sidebar + main content layout.
• _includes/nav.html holds the navigation links.
• assets/style.css holds all styling.
• Top‑level .md files are pages (index.md, people.md, etc.).

Edit Navigation

• Update links in _includes/nav.html.
• Keep URLs relative and prefixed with {{ site.baseurl }} for GitHub Pages compatibility.

Add a New Page

1. Create a new .md file at the repo root.
2. Add front matter with layout: default and title: Your Page Title.
3. Add a link in _includes/nav.html.

GitHub Pages Build

• GitHub Pages typically builds from the master branch and the repository root for user/organization sites.
• The workflow in .github/workflows/jekyll-docker.yml runs jekyll build in a Docker container on pushes to master as a build check (it does not deploy).
• No unsupported plugins are used, so the site is GitHub Pages compatible.

Local Preview (Bundler)

• Use a modern Ruby (rbenv/asdf recommended; avoid macOS system Ruby).
• bundle install
• bundle exec jekyll serve

Docker Preview

• docker run --rm -it -p 4000:4000 -v "$PWD":/srv/jekyll -w /srv/jekyll jekyll/jekyll:pages jekyll serve --host 0.0.0.0

Notes

• Gemfile.lock is not tracked to avoid Bundler/Ruby version pinning issues; GitHub Pages uses its own pinned versions during deployment.