CU Computer Systems Lab Website

Source for the Computer Systems Research Lab site at the University of Colorado Boulder — systems.cs.colorado.edu.

Built with Jekyll and hosted on GitHub Pages.

Updating the Site

To request an update to any page on this site, contact Yueqi Chen (yueqi.chen@colorado.edu).

If you have write access and want to make the change yourself, see Making Changes below.

How the Site Is Built

The live site is a single page — index.html — with four anchor sections:

Section	Anchor	Content comes from
About	#about	Text written directly in index.html
Faculty	#faculty	_data/faculty.yml
Research Areas	#research-areas	_data/researchAreas.yml, rendered by _includes/area.html
Gallery	#gallery	_data/gallery.yml

Nearly all content lives in the YAML files under _data/ — you rarely need to touch HTML.

Making Changes

Add or edit a faculty member

Edit _data/faculty.yml. Entries are sorted alphabetically by last name:

- name: Joshua Viszlai (Joining Aug 2027)
  image_url: /assets/img/faculty/jviszlai.png
  areas:
    - Quantum Computing
  website: https://jviszlai.github.io/

Put the photo in assets/img/faculty/. Only name is required; image_url, areas, and website are optional. Without image_url the card falls back to assets/img/faculty/default.jpg.

Appointment status goes in the name field as a parenthetical — (Prof. Emeritus), (On-Leave), (Joining Aug 2027). The card has no separate field for titles or affiliations, and keeping every card to the same shape (photo, name, website, areas) is deliberate.

areas values must exactly match a title: in _data/researchAreas.yml. That string match is what places someone under a research area in the Research Areas section. Anything that does not match still shows on the person's card but groups them nowhere. (The tags: field in researchAreas.yml is not used by any template.)

Edit a research area

Edit _data/researchAreas.yml:

- title: Networking, Wireless & Mobile Systems
  caption: Networking, Wireless & Mobile Systems
  tags:
    - Networks
    - Wireless
  description: |
    - Markdown bullet points describing the area.

title is what faculty entries reference in their areas: list, so renaming a title means updating every _data/faculty.yml entry that used the old name. caption is the heading shown on the page and description is markdown. tags is unused by the templates — it is left over from an earlier version.

Add gallery photos

Put the images in assets/img/gallery/, then add an entry to _data/gallery.yml:

- title: Retirement BBQ
  description: The lab gave a retirement party with barbeque.
  image_url:
  - /assets/img/gallery/bbq-2.jpg
  - /assets/img/gallery/bbq-7.jpg

Edit the About text or the banner

The About copy is plain HTML in index.html. The banner image is assets/img/banner.jpg.

Site-wide settings

_config.yml holds the site title, description, URL, and department address. Jekyll does not reload this file automatically — restart the local server after editing it.

Local Preview

Requires Ruby 3.1+ and Bundler.

bundle install
bundle exec jekyll serve

The site is then at http://localhost:4000.

If you would rather not install Ruby, you can use Docker:

docker run --rm -it -v "$PWD":/app -w /app -p 4000:4000 ruby:3.3 \
  bash -c "bundle install && bundle exec jekyll serve --host 0.0.0.0"

Deployment

Pushing to master publishes the site — GitHub Pages rebuilds it automatically, usually within a minute or two. There is no separate deploy branch and no GitHub Actions workflow.

Because the build uses GitHub's own server-side Jekyll toolchain, the committed Gemfile.lock does not affect the published site. It only pins versions for local previews and is what Dependabot scans, so it is still worth keeping current:

bundle lock --update

The custom domain is set by the CNAME file (systems.cs.colorado.edu).

Repository Layout

index.html            The live site (single page)
_config.yml           Jekyll and site settings
_data/                Site content — faculty, research areas, gallery
_includes/            Reusable template fragments
_layouts/             Page templates
assets/               CSS, JS, images
CNAME                 Custom domain

Legacy files

The repo still carries material from an earlier multi-page version of the site: about.html, blog.html, contact.html, projects.html, team.html, the people/ directory, and everything under collections/. None of it is linked from the live site. Some of those pages also render empty, because the collections they loop over (site.alumni, site.postdocs, site.projects) are not declared in _config.yml.

Treat these as inactive. If you want one of them back, it needs to be wired up in _config.yml and linked from index.html — editing the file alone will not make it appear.

Credits

The design is based on the Business Jekyll Theme by Melvin Ch'ng, itself a Jekyll port of the Office template by Technext.