What is AcIO?
AcIo is a static website generator for github repositories. It was designed for scientists so that we could better present our research and importantly code to a wider audience than just the group of researchers who are comforatble with coding and github enough to view it. The hope of AcIO is that it will enable researchers a fast way (>5 minute time investment) to generate a website which they can share with collaborators or even non-scientific audience their research.
Why did I think this is needed?
With the explosion of ‘omic’ techniques in biology, we are generating huge amounts of data which are often impossible or at least very difficult to process using simple GUI’s such as JMP, excel, etc. Because of this as well as the rise of R and Python for use in data science, more research than before has began to be done in some coding language. I believe as we keep generating larger and larger datasets that expanding the availability and accessibility of our code will be increasingly important. Github has enabled the free hosting and sharing of our code and datasets as well the ability to host website through github pages. However, generating a nice looking website for your github repository is not an inconsequential task and as a result I have not seen many people try to generate individual website for each repository. AcIO is my answer for this problem; I hope that by supplying other researchers with a quick way to generate a website through a graphical user interphace (GUI) we will be able to better share our code and research.