openrails.org for GitHub Pages

This is an ongoing port of the openrails.org website to GitHub Pages. It is already live on or-test.youngryan.com.

To-do list

• Investigate storage for large files
  • Installers, builds, and source code
  • PDF documents
  • DemoModel1.zip
• Automate the publishing of new builds
• Replace the changelog API
• Track visitor hardware and software configurations

Building and testing

Use the Remote Containers extension for Visual Studio Code, along with Docker Desktop, to build and test the website on Windows. After opening the project folder in a container, press F5 (or use Run > Start Debugging) to run Jekyll. The site will be available at http://localhost:4000.

Changes from the PHP version

• We cannot read file sizes or modification times on GitHub Pages, so we manually populate this data with JSON files.
• The download confirmation page has been removed in favor of direct links.
• Banner and Open Hub randomization now require JavaScript to be enabled.
• The "Changes since last visit" and "Website Statistics" features have been removed.
• The contact form no longer sends the IP address and HTTP referer of the sender. This information needs to be retrieved by @cjakeman's CGI program.