CSML Reading Group Website

This is the website for the Computational Statistics & Machine Learning (CSML) reading group at Lancaster University.

The site is built with Jekyll and hosted on GitHub Pages.

Adding a New Talk

Adding a New Talk

All talks are stored in _data/talks.yml. To add a new talk, add an entry at the top of the file:

- date: 2025-12-15
  speaker: Jane Doe
  affiliation: Cambridge
  title: My Talk Title

Optional Fields

You can include an abstract directly. Note: If your abstract contains colons (:), wrap the entire abstract in double quotes " to avoid errors.

- date: 2025-12-15
  speaker: Jane Doe
  title: My Talk Title
  # Single link
  link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2025...
  link_text: arXiv
  # OR Multiple links
  links:
    - url: https://arxiv.org/abs/2025...
      text: Paper 1
    - url: https://github.com/janedoe/code
      text: Code
  abstract: "This is the abstract. If it has a colon: like this, wrap it in quotes."
  slides: https://example.com/slides.pdf

Site Sections

• Schedule (/schedule): Shows upcoming talks and "Recent Past Talks" (from the current academic year only).
• Past Talks (/talks): The full archive of all past talks from previous years. Future talks do not appear here.

Adding Slides

You can upload a PDF to the pdf/ folder and link it: slides: /pdf/your_slides.pdf

Or simply paste an external URL if hosted elsewhere.

Local Development

Prerequisites

1. Ruby (version 2.7 or higher) — Installation guide

   • Windows: Use RubyInstaller
   • macOS: brew install ruby
   • Linux: sudo apt install ruby-full (Debian/Ubuntu)

2. Bundler — Install with: gem install bundler

3. Python Environment (for Word Cloud generation)

   The site uses a Python script to generate the word cloud. You need to set up a virtual environment:

   # Create virtual environment
   python3 -m venv .venv
   
   # Install dependencies
   .venv/bin/pip install wordcloud pyyaml

Running Locally

# Install dependencies (first time only)
bundle install

# Start the development server
bundle exec jekyll serve

The site will be available at http://localhost:4000.

The server will auto-rebuild when you make changes. Press Ctrl+C to stop.

Deployment

Just push to the main branch - GitHub Pages will automatically rebuild the site.

Structure

├── _data/
│   └── talks.yml          # All talk data lives here
├── _layouts/
│   └── default.html       # Base HTML template
├── index.md               # Homepage (shows recent 10 talks)
├── talks.md               # Full archive (past talks by year)
├── post/                  # Abstract pages
├── pdf/                   # Slides PDFs
└── css/                   # Stylesheets