This website was made using Jekyll with the Garth theme used as the basis. The Garth theme has been modified directly and is not used as a Gem theme.

This website was intended to be simple to develop and maintain (I hope for my sake that this is true) and significant scalability has not been considered.

Basic Website Structure

There are three main data structures used in this website: Plants, animals and regions. Plants are associated with regions and animals can be associated with regions and/or plants. There are sub-categories of plants and animals for weeds and pests respectively, but these are the same as the base object type with an additional attribute to identify them.

Maintenance

Because the site leans heavily on structured front matter, a validation script (var/yaml_check.rb) checks every plant, region and animal against the expected schema — field types, month ranges, care-schedule format, and cross-references between the three collections. It runs before every build, and the build stops if anything fails. The generated HTML is then checked with HTMLProofer for broken links and images before anything is published.