techbookclub's official site

http://techbookclub.github.com/library/

The beginning of an online archive of the techbookclub collective.

Initially, a browsable archive of the material pursued by the San Francisco and New York City contingents.

Building the Site

You can add or update posts editing .md files in the _posts directory. To compile them into HTML that can be pushed to our GitHub page, ake sure you have the "bundler" gem installed. Then run:

bundle
bundle exec rake build_jekyll

Adding Books

To add a book your club is reading, edit books_metadata.json. Add an entry at the top of the "books" array under your club name ("SF" or "NYC", for now) that contains a title, author, and read date. The build script will attempt to find this on Readmill:

bundle exec rake build_book_metadata

For reading material that can't be found on Readmill (or doesn't exist there, like our "course packets"), don't fret. Just add a "custom_content" key to your entry, pointing to an object that mimics the Readmill format. The key pieces to include will look like this:

"custom_content": {
"book": {
  "title": "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore: A Novel",
  "author": "Robin Sloan",
  "story": "A gleeful and exhilarating tale of global conspiracy.... ",
  "published_at": "",
  "permalink_url": "https://readmill.com/books/mr-penumbras-24-hour-bookstore-a-novel",
  "cover_url": "https://readmill-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/covers/d0ec737f9fbdc5de731f2bfedae9a763-original.png?1349203108"
}

To transform the newly downloaded JSON into markdown files that Jekyll can use, run:

bundle exec rake build_markdown

The Future

• Details about the collective's beginning
• Information on how to join the club
• Accounts for members to allow for:
  • A voting system to elect new material, a meeting time/date
  • Private downloads of copyrighted material
• An Amazon affiliates account to append to public links to bring in funds for snacks/drinks at meetings