| title | author | layout |
|---|---|---|
About the HSF newsletter website |
Torre Wenaus |
default |
This site is maintained by the HSF GitHub contributors. If you're interested to become one contact the HSF coordination team or any team member. It was set up by Torre Wenaus and Benedikt Hegner.
This website is implemented using GitHub's Pages service which makes it easy to create a website associated with a GitHub account or project. Pages uses Jekyll, a tool to automatically build a website from source files (which are kept in GitHub). It supports structured sites like blogs in a simple but powerful way. The site content is written using the easy Markdown syntax (which is used by GitHub itself).
A HSF documentation provides some useful hints to make using Jekyll in the HSF context easier.
For adding information to this page or improving it, we follow the pull request workflow in GitHub.
Just fork our HSF website repository, edit the files you want to edit, push them to your fork, and open a pull request.
If you wish (and it is recommended) you can easily set up a local instance of the newsletter site in order to preview your submissions. See the documentation on installing and running Jekyll. The website uses the master branch of the hsf.github.io repository.
If you are not familiar with GitHub and Git, you can read our survival kit!
All Markdown files of this site start with a section surrounded by ---. This
so-called front-matter contains metadata about the content. Such metadata are,
e.g., the author of the document or the title of the document.
In the front-matter (but not in the text itself), you need to replace any & characters (which has a special meaning in HTML) by &. This is particularly important for the title attribute.
It is sometimes handy to use GoogleDoc to produce some contents for the web site. For example, if taking minutes during a meeting, it allows several people to contribute to the effort of note taking and other persons who attended the meeting to validate/update them. It is then easy to convert a properly formatted GoogleDoc (using standard heading levels) to Markdown for inserting it into the website. Look at our documentation on how to do it.
Add a new file in the _workinggroups or _activities directory and follow the front-matter of the
other files in there. The Working Groups / Activities menu in the navigation bar will
be updated automatically: the menu entry text is the title attribute in the front-matter section.
Add a new file in events/_posts and follow the front-matter (see above) of the other files
in there. The Events page and the Upcoming Events sidebar will be updated automatically.
Add a new file in announcements/_posts and follow the front matter of the other files in there. The front page will
get a new box with all information.
Please don't forget adding an event until in the front-matter: this is used for ordering events and as the end date
for adding the event in the Upcoming Events sidebar.
As of writing, this website contains the following page templates for wider usage:
- default - every page inherits from this
- event - to be used for events
- newsletter - to be used for news items and announcements
- plain - to be used for standard contents
- main - the main page w/ boxes
- minutes - used for meeting minutes (the template adds forward / backward navigation links)
The menu bar is defined in _includes/navbar.ext, from which all page layouts inherit.
The layout is somewhat hard-coded, but working groups and activities are generated
automatically.
The main page contains three blocks, mostly hard-coded:
- A meetings block, with links to the minutes of the last three meetings auto-generated
- A news item that holds a small snippet of current important information (currently this is hard-coded, but it would be better if it were more dynamic)
- An activities block, that serves as an entry point to the main sections of the website
They are filled with Liquid snippets.