I'm a computer engineering student, in my 4th year. While doing some lab work the other day, my friends and I were struck yet again by how little useful information is available to CE students online. We needed schematics for a Brent-Kung adder, but
we couldn't find anything. The same thing happens when you search for info on, say, VHDL.
This gave me an idea. "I've got four years worth of notes and knowledge, as do my friends in the program. Why not put them online, aimed at CE students?" All the info would be checked and approved before going online.
My question is, how should I structure things? I like simplicity--I write C, I use Plan 9, I write my papers in troff. That makes me want to write an HTML site, static, with subsections put together by myself or other approved creators. Since my intention is to provide the notes and useful information from myself and a few friends, this does not seem unreasonable.
I know what you're all thinking right now--"just make a wiki". Well, I've also considered doing that, but it just doesn't seem like the right fit, for reasons I can't quite explain.
As someone who typically doesn't worry about the web, I'd appreciate any suggestions on how to do this, what sort of technology to use, etc.
Realistically, you're going to need some kind of basic dynamic capability, and once your site grows beyond 20+ pages you'll save more time than the time it takes to learn it.
Sounds like you don't need much, and PHP (or really any dynamic language I've seen) has an 'include' directive for adding headers and footers and would take you all of two seconds to learn (beware, there's a ton of bad code out there. The good resources have been discussed in many other HN posts.)
For the super-basic stuff any dynamic language will do fine, so just mark it up in whatever stack you're comfortable with the tools for (I'd recommend PHP, Python, or Ruby in increasing orders of complexity for a basic site.)
You might also consider a real CMS in case you want to bring more non-technical people on, or add authentication later. Wordpress is fairly full featured on the editor, has user privileges, and I believe it has plugins to support LaTeX and other Math markup easily. Again, any leaders in the space should be fine for what you want to do.
On the actual code side, mark it up in strict html or xhtml, test it in at least FF/IE6/IE7/Safari, and try to seperate your CSS into classes in external file(s) as much as possible so you can change your design later with less headaches. If things are set up right, adding a css stylsheet for mobile would be trivial, which might be nice for times when you need a formula at the library.
I hear good things about the book 'Head First HTML' from beginners, and if you're at any high level with computing you should breeze through it. Alternately, just get a CMS and file a style you like and be done with it.
In your case, I'd argue that there's an explicit tradeoff between simplicity of the code and simplicity of the final implementation. If you want a basic site with slim, clean code, you're going to have to do some learning. If you want a quick deployment that 'just works', you could do it in a few hours, but have less control over the elegance of the solution.
P.S.: Cool idea. I'd bet you could even charge for some of it, if you were so inclined.