There’s no shortage of good education sites out there – inquiry blogs, subject hubs, official IB resource centres, worksheet generators, planning frameworks – and there are more of them every year. Finding a good resource was never the problem. Keeping track of the ones I’d already found was.

You bookmark something brilliant mid-unit, move on, and by the time you’d actually use it again the unit’s finished, the term’s changed, or you’ve moved year levels entirely and it’s sitting three folders deep in a browser bookmarks bar that’s really just a graveyard sorted by the order you found things in. The resource never went anywhere. Your ability to find it again did. So I built Edu Links: a small, static site that’s nothing but curated links, organised by subject, searchable, and boring enough on purpose that I’ll actually keep it current.

What it actually is

Not a bookmarking app, not a CMS, nothing to log into. It’s a Jekyll site – one YAML file (_data/links.yml) holding every link, grouped by subject and then by sub-area, rendered as cards with a logo, a name, and a one-line description of why it’s useful rather than just what it is. Right now that’s 101 links across six subjects – Maths, Literacy, Class Utilities, Research, PYP, and Christian Studies – split into 30 sub-areas like fluency_and_number_facts and atl_skills.

Adding a link means editing one file: a name, a url, a description under the right subject and sub-area, commit, and GitHub Actions rebuilds the site. No admin panel, no database, nothing else to think about.

The small stuff that took longer than the big stuff

Card logos are fetched automatically from each site’s favicon – one less thing to source and upload by hand. But favicons fail: a 404, a school network’s content filter blocking the request, whatever. An onerror handler on the image quietly drops it and falls back to a letter tile instead of a broken-image icon. Simple enough, until two failed favicons that happen to share an initial letter render as identical tiles, and a page full of “these look like copies of each other” is worse than no logos at all. The fix isn’t randomness – that would make cards flicker between colours on every rebuild – it’s a cheap deterministic hash of the link’s name and domain, spread across a small palette, so the same link always lands on the same tile colour but a different link with the same initial lands on a different one.

Headings needed their own small fix too. Sub-area keys are snake_case (atl_skills, inquiry_and_planning), turned into display headings automatically – which is fine until an acronym runs through the same title-casing logic and “ATL” becomes “Atl”. An acronyms list in _config.yml (ATL, PYP, IB, STEM, STEAM, ICT, BTN, PZ) keeps those fixed, matched on whole words only, so “atlas” doesn’t get mangled into “ATLas” along the way.

Search, without needing a server

Every link is also written into a generated search.json at build time, and a small vanilla-JS script searches it client-side – press / from anywhere on the site, the way most docs sites work, and it searches every subject at once rather than just the page you’re on. It’s progressive enhancement on purpose: if the script fails to load for any reason, the site still works exactly as well as it did before JavaScript existed, you just browse by page instead of searching.

Built over a weekend

Scaffolded Saturday, real content and the search/UI pass on Sunday – empty repo to a live, searchable site in a weekend, which is about the right level of ambition for a resource hub. It doesn’t need to be clever. It needs to still be useful next term, and the term after that, once I’ve completely forgotten I ever found half of what’s on it.

Repo’s at andrew-snape/edsites if you want to see how it’s put together, or steal the favicon-fallback trick for a link dump of your own.

Andrew