This is the repository for the phillymesh.net website!
This site is built with the open-source Hugo static site generator, which converts Markdown posts and pages into HTML.
Anyone is welcome to submit updates to this site via pull request. GitHub maintains a great guide for creating a pull request if you've never made one before. Note that if you are part of the Philly Mesh organization you can make a pull request utilizing the shared repository mode which is easy, fast, and great for collaboration. If you are outside of the org you must create a pull request from a fork.
After submitting a PR, someone in the organization will review the changes and either approve them or request updates.
Merged updates will go live automatically via a GitHub Actions workflow.
New posts are incredibly easy! Make a new page in the content/post directory in the format YYYY-MM-DD-your-post-slug.md. The resulting rendered URL will be phillymesh.net/YYYY/MM-DD/your-post-slug. The YYYY-MM-DD should be the date you start working on the post or intend to have it published.
At the top of your .md file you need to include front matter that acts as metadata about the post. Here is an example:
---
title: Station G2 Node Installation
author: Mike Dank (Famicoman)
type: post
date: 2025-03-24T00:00:01+00:00
url: /2025/03/24/station-g2-node-installation/
categories:
- Philly Mesh
tags:
- meshtastic
- stationg2
#cspell:ignore stationg2
---This format is pretty self-explanatory and as long as you have a sensible title, your preferred name for the author, the proper date, and a url that matches your filename, you should be good. Currently, most posts use Philly Mesh as the category and include some tags that pertain to the content of the most. For a full explanation of front matter fields, you can consult this reference.
the #cspell:ignore line is explained below in the Spell Checking section
Posts are written in Markdown, and a quick reference is available here.
If your post needs images, you can make a new folder in the static/images/uploads directory with the same name as your post file, such as YYYY-MM-DD-your-post-slug. In this directory you can upload any images (or other files really) that you would like to include in the post. Pictures can be referenced in your post in a variety of ways, with the most popular being a markdown approach. However, if you need more control over your images there are a few options. NOTE: We highly encourage alt text for accessibility!
This figure shortcode is great if you want to include captions with your images:
{{< figure src="/images/uploads/YYYY-MM-DD-your-post-slug/your-cool-photo.png" caption="Your cool caption." alt="Describe the picture" link="/images/uploads/YYYY-MM-DD-your-post-slug/your-cool-photo.png">}}
If you need control over styling and width/height, you can add html attributes with braces on the next line
{width="50%"}
NOTE: Due to the way paths are set up in Hugo, your images will not preview properly because the src is set to an absolute path starting with /images. For drafting a new post you may want to use ../../static/images instead but this will not work properly after the page is rendered for the site. Please make sure to switch back to the absolute path before committing.
In an effort to reduce typos across the site, we are making use of CSpell, a spell checker for code.
If you're editing in a VSCode or fork, I'd recommend installing the Code Spell Checker extension to highlight unrecognized words using the cspell engine.
Otherwise you can run it from the command line with
npx cspell your-file-name.md which requires you to have node installed.
If you want to check all the files for spelling issues, you can run
npx cspell and check the output
If your post includes some proper nouns or other words that aren't likely to be in the dictionary, you can suppress spellcheck errors by adding that word to the "ignore" list in the "front matter" with the cspell:ignore command as a comment
For example:
---
title: A new Post
author: Your name
#cspell:ignore ProperNoun
---This isn't a requirement, but saves maintainers time if you can preemptively fix the spelling issue.
If you want to run the site locally to test changes, you can do the following on a Debian Linux host. Hugo maintains a getting started guide if you use a different operating system, though many steps will be similar.
First, install git and grab Hugo extended:
sudo apt install git
wget https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/releases/download/v0.147.8/hugo_extended_0.147.8_Linux-64bit.tar.gz
tar -xzf hugo_*.tar.gz && rm hugo_*.tar.gz
chmod +x hugo
Now, clone the phillymesh.net repo and pull down the theme via submodule update:
git clone https://github.com/phillymesh/phillymesh.net.git
cd phillymesh.net
git submodule update --init --recursive
Finally, run hugo and build the site, hosting it on a live webserver:
hugo server
You now have a live server of the site running at http://127.0.0.1:1313