First Draft of Web Page Data

By April 25, 2018 each team will submit a relatively brief document that provides data for a web page that describes the team's project.

The document must be in in Markdown format and contain the information listed below. You can download a template document and modify it with a text editor Do not use a word processor, like Microsoft Word, to edit the file.

To create the web page content for your team

  1. Download the template
  2. Modify the content of the template
    • Update the data fields for title, sponsor and sponsor_url in the YAML header
    • Edit the content, while leaving the Project Objectives, Team, Customer/Market Requirements, Design Challenges and Outcomes headers. In other words, add content to those sections. Adding subheadings is OK.
    • Provide at least one image file for your content
  3. Upload your plain text markdown file and any images files to the D2L dropbox.

The rest of this page has links to help you understand and edit the markdown format. A separate document (PDF) provides an annotated version of the markdown template along with additional description of the markdown format. You can download the annotated version of the raw markdown template.

You can use https://markdownlivepreview.com/ to preview your content.

Rstudio is an integrated development environment for R. Rstudio is installed on computers in the MCECS network.

Rstudio can be used as an editor and previewer for the Markdown file you are creating for your web page assignment using these steps

  1. Launch R Studio
  2. Open the Markdown file, e.g., myteam.md
  3. Click the Preview button in the toolbar or select Preview from the File menu

You can then edit the Markdown file and click Preview to view the changes.

Document Format

Web pages for ME 493 are generated with Jekyll, a software system written in Ruby that generates static web pages from a collection of plain text files. The text files use Markdown to define the structural elements and formatting of the file. The final appearance of the file is controlled by Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

To create a web page for MME Capstone projects, teams need to supply a single plain text file and image files in JPEG or PNG format. Do not worry about learning or installing Jekyll.

To edit the contents of the markdown file use a text editor. Do not use Microsoft Word or other word-processors. If you are using a computer running the Windows OS, these text editors will work

  • Notepad (built-in)
  • Notepad++ supplied on MCECS windows computers
  • TextPad supplied on MCECS windows computers
  • Atom if you are serious about writing code. It's free. It integrates with github
  • Sublime text another serious code editing tool. It's not free

These Windows apps have built-in Markdown previewers;

If you are using a computer running Mac OS, these text editors will work

  • TextEdit (built-in). Save as plain text, not RTF. In the Format menu, select Make Plain Text, then save the document
  • Atom if you are serious about writing code. It's free. It integrates with github
  • Brackets is a new text editor from Adobe that is designed for web development
  • BBedit is a powerful text/code editor. A slightly limited version of BBEdit is free. The full-featured version is $50

These Macintosh apps have built-in Markdown previewers:

If you are running Linux, you probably have your favorite text editor. Some editors with Markdown preview available on Linux are

There are many more text editors for each platform. You only need a simple text editor to update the content of the markdown file that describes your team's project


Document updated 2018-04-03.

Go back to the Assignments page.