Static Site For A Meetup

Github’s free hosting of jekyll and static sites makes my life easier. I host this blog, for instance, using gh-pages. I recently started a meetup in my hometown and wanted to create a single-page site to both promote the group and serve as a training grounds for anyone new to front-end work.

To avoid double-entering any data from the meetup site, I created a build step that copies group data from the meetup API, pipes it through a couple of filters, and makes a jekyll _config.yml file.

When I want to update the data from my site’s group data, I run ./build.sh <api key> and push the changes to github. Jekyll’s liquid templates take care of updating the static content of the _site folder once github detects the push to master. If I wanted to provide the same data in a live call I would either need to expose my API key (in the js source) or create a proxy (like in heroku) to hold my key. For such a small-scale implementation, neither option seemed appealing.

I think this pattern could be very helpful for generating sites based on API content; especially if that API has a differencing endpoint. As long as a content API can describe (and provide affordances for) any resources changed since a particular date, a script could copy the new data and generate a new site. If I needed to manage several sites or a particularly large site, a custom app could sit in between the content API and github; checking for changes and pushing updates at particular times.