BIL Conference — the ad-hoc, participant-powered unconference. Static Jekyll site for GitHub Pages, preserving 56 events across five continents (2008–2018), 401 speakers, and 295 talks, 123 of them with video — counts that grow as more line-ups are recovered.
Content was exported from the site's WordPress multisite database when it
moved to static hosting in August 2026. Relationships (talk to event and
speaker, event to organizers, sponsors, and press) are resolved into
frontmatter slugs; featured images were recovered from the database's
attachment records. Each content file keeps its wordpress_id and
original_url for traceability. The design is the original bil-theme
(BILconference/bil-theme): sky blue #2ea3f2 on white, Hind and Open Sans,
the neuron hero banner, and the dotted world map.
| Path | What |
|---|---|
_events/ |
56 events with dates, venue, organizers, sponsor/press refs |
_speakers/ |
speakers (the BIL 2015 Vancouver roster is folded in, marked bil_2015: true) |
_talks/ |
talks linked to event + speaker, many with YouTube video |
_organizers/ |
75 organizers (rendered inline on event pages) |
_sponsors/ |
32 sponsors (rendered inline on event pages) |
_press/ |
15 press mentions |
2014/, 2015/ |
Archived per-event sub-sites (2014/2015.bilconference.com) |
assets/ |
Stylesheet, flags, scripts, theme graphics |
media/ |
Original WordPress uploads, referenced as /media/... |
Drop a markdown file in the right collection folder and push. A talk needs
event: and speaker: slugs in frontmatter to link up; a youtube: URL
gets an embedded player. See each folder's README for the fields.
bundle install
RUBYOPT="-r./scripts/ruby34-compat.rb" bundle exec jekyll serveThe RUBYOPT shim is only needed on Ruby >= 3.2 (see
scripts/ruby34-compat.rb); GitHub Pages builds without it.
After adding or changing images, run scripts/optimize-media.sh — it caps
originals at 1600px and generates the media/thumbs/ variants the
templates use for grids (see media/README.md).
Push to main; GitHub Pages builds automatically. The site serves at
https://bilconference.com via the CNAME file, with url: in
_config.yml matching.