7. Maintainance and Sustainability

DH in Prison and Intro to DH are static sites. This makes the rate of decay of their pages substantially lower than that of dynamic or database-driven systems. Neither of the sites rely on external web-based extensions or plugins to generate their pages. This makes their pages extremely stable. To ensure future compatibility with web hosting services and other devices, the versions of Ruby and Jekyll that make the sites run should be updated periodically, but if this is done once or twice a year everything should be fine.

The site architecture/code of DH in Prison and Intro to DH depend on Ed., the Jekyll theme they were built with. Ed. is licensed under an MIT license which guarantees that I own the software and it cannot be taken away. The Ed. Jekyll theme was built by Alex Gil within the Global Outlook Minimal Computing working group based at Columbia University and has remained stable and up to date since its release in 2016. As a minimal edition, Ed. is relatively easy to build and modify, and its static pages require less bandwidth than most dynamic sites.

While most websites are written in markup languages such as Extensible Markup Language (XML), Intro to DH uses kramdown syntax, a variation of Markdown syntax, which, as human readable plain text, requires a much lower learning curve than markup languages do. This makes content easy to update and change without requiring programming expertise, wherefore this project can easily expand and grow. By using kramdown syntax we eliminate the need to have technical experts deploy and maintain this work, thus expanding access to contributors.

DH in Prison and Intro to DH will be hosted on Reclaim Hosting, an internet hosting service that provides educators, institutions and students domains and web hosting.¹ These domains cost at most $65 a year are transferable, so if this project grows into larger community effort, it will continue to have its domains.

Next: 8. Conclusion