The US-RSE Association Conference 2026 (USRSE'26)

This repo is website landing page for the US-RSE Association Conference 2026.

Previewing the Site Locally

To preview the site locally, you'll need to install jekyll. Then go to the root of the directory and run (only needed once):

$ bundle install

Then run

$ jekyll serve
# or
$ bundle exec jekyll serve

and open your browser to http://localhost:4000/usrse26/.

If you are having trouble try rm -rf _site, followed by bundle update, then bundle exec jekyll serve.

Container-based development

Build and run a Docker container to preview the site locally and support a local development workflow. If you do not already have Docker installed, please visit https://docs.docker.com/get-docker/ and follow the links to get started with Docker on your operating system.

Build the container image:

docker build -t us-rse-con-2024-website:latest .

Run the container to access the website at the URL http://127.0.0.1:4000/usrse26/

$ docker run --rm -it -p 4000:4000 us-rse-con-2024-website:latest
Configuration file: /srv/jekyll/_config.yml
            Source: /srv/jekyll
       Destination: /srv/jekyll/_site
 Incremental build: disabled. Enable with --incremental
      Generating... 
                    done in 1.616 seconds.
 Auto-regeneration: enabled for '/srv/jekyll'
    Server address: http://0.0.0.0:4000/usrse26/
  Server running... press ctrl-c to stop.

To develop the website, launch the container using the following command, where the source files are mounted into the container:

docker run --rm -it -p 4000:4000 \
    -v $(pwd):/srv/jekyll \
    us-rse-con-2024-website:latest \
    bundle exec jekyll serve --host=0.0.0.0 --watch --drafts

Change a source file, such as index.html for example, and save the changes. You will see Jekyll automatically regenerate the site, after which you can reload the page in your browser to see the rendered changes.

Building the Program Schedule

The program page is generated from the "Schedule" tab of the program Google Sheet by scripts/build-program.js (Node 18+, no dependencies), which writes _includes/program-schedule.html and _data/program.json. Edit the sheet, not those files.

The sheet ID is intentionally not committed to the repo. The script reads it from the PROGRAM_SHEET_ID environment variable — it is the long token in the sheet's docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/<id>/... URL.

Local development

Rebuild from the live sheet:

PROGRAM_SHEET_ID=<sheet-id> node scripts/build-program.js

Or build offline from the checked-in fixture, which needs no sheet ID:

node scripts/build-program.js --file fixtures/schedule.csv

Then preview the site as described above to see the regenerated program page.

GitHub Action

The Rebuild program schedule workflow (.github/workflows/build-program.yml) rebuilds the program daily and commits only when the schedule changed. It requires the sheet ID as a repository secret (not a variable) so it stays out of the source and is masked in logs:

1. Go to the repo's Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions → Secrets.
2. Add a repository secret named PROGRAM_SHEET_ID with the sheet ID as its value.

Until the secret is set, scheduled runs skip quietly; a manual Run workflow fails with an explicit error instead, so you can tell the workflow is unconfigured rather than broken.

CircleCI PR previews

Every pull request gets a site preview from the CircleCI build-site job (.circleci/config.yml), which runs bundle exec jekyll build and stores the resulting _site as build artifacts. That job never runs scripts/build-program.js and has no access to the sheet — the preview renders whatever versions of _includes/program-schedule.html and _data/program.json are committed on the branch. So if a change should affect the program page, commit the regenerated artifacts and the preview will reflect them; no CircleCI configuration is needed.

scripts/ and fixtures/ are listed under exclude in _config.yml so the build tooling is not copied into the built site or the preview artifacts.

Adding logos to the website

There is an _include file, add-sponsor-logo.html, that can be used to add a sponsor's logo anywhere on the website. You can use the function by calling: {% include add-sponsor-logo.html sponsor_url="some_url" logo_file="logo-filename.png" logo_alt="Some alt text for users" %} See the include file for details on the variable names. The logo files need to be added to the assets/img/sponsor-logos/ directory.

Logos on the main page

To add the sponsor logos to the main page, follow the same directions as above, but make sure the include call is in the correct tier section for the sponsor. For example, UIUC is a platinum sponsor, so they are added to the <div class="row sponsor-platinum ...> block.