About This Template

This is a work in progress! This template is not finished!

storymapjs-template is a basic Jekyll template for creating self-hosted StoryMapJS on GitHub Pages (or where ever you want to host it!).

It is compatible with existing projects created using the StoryMapsJS authoring tool or standard StoryMapsJS formatted JSON files. Additionally, storymapjs-template supports a spreadsheet template that simplifies manually creating your storymap data.

Why storymapjs-template?

StoryMapJS from Northwestern University’s Knight Lab is a popular open-source project to create visual map based stories that can be embedded on a webpage. Their “authoring tool” provides a method to create and publish a storymap embed using your Google account. This is great for getting started with minimal setup and no overhead.

However, relying on this platform can be problematic:

• API outages and changes unexpectedly break the StoryMapJS service and make it unsustainable in the long term.
• you may not have a convenient location to host your media files or a website to embed your timelines.
• if you already have structured data, using the “authoring tool” is a big pain… It might be easier to use a spreadsheet or create your own JSON.

To avoid these issues you can self-host your StoryMapJS projects and use the standalone javascript to create your story map without relying on any 3rd party services.

The storymapjs-template implements the basics of StoryMapJS in a simple Jekyll project template to make self-hosting easy on GitHub Pages. This approach is more sustainable, keeping the library assets, metadata, and media together in a self-contained package (rather than multiple 3rd party platforms).

Get Started

The basic steps for using storymapjs-template are:

1. Create repository from the template
2. Edit “_config.yml”
3. Add your StoryMap data
4. Add to a page and edit content
5. Use builtin customization options
6. Active GitHub Pages

See docs/storymap.md for details!