Making a landing page for MongoDB The Definitive Guide

In advance of the book launch later in December I’ve been doing a little preparation. It turns out that Github is proving not just a useful location for the source code but that it also is an excellent place to host the book’s website/landing page.

I owe a lot of thanks to Michael Hausenblas and his own excellent book on Programming Kubernetes which served as the inspiration and guide for my own landing page.

This used Github Pages and Jekyll with the ‘minimal’ theme by Steve Smith. I also choose to use this approach for my landing page.

I turned to gandi.net for my domain registration and in keeping with several other O’Reilly authors, I chose a .info domain. I decided on the short, simple, and available mongodbbook.info domain name.

After adding the content to the landing page, including a soon to be active Twitter account at “MongodbT”. I made some minor tweaks to the _config.yml file, specifically:

author:
  twitter: eoinbrazil
url: "https://mongodbbook.info/"
plugins:
  - jekyll-sitemap
  - jekyll-feed

This minor additions allow for attribution to my twitter handle as well as providing a sitemap xml file and a atom feed file. The Sitemap file allowed me to submit it to Bing, Google, and Yandex to allow it to be crawled a little sooner than if left to the automated crawler searches.