LDAV Web Instructions

This archive (and this readme file in particular) provides suggested instructions for maintaining and updating the LDAV Symposium web pages. The LDAV web pages are currently being hosted by GitHub pages, so modifying web pages is done by updating files in the respective GitHub repositories.

Starting with the initial preparations for LDAV, beginning soon after the previous year's symposium, the general procedure is as follows.

1. Create a new web page
2. Make new page live
3. Rotate in new page
4. Update page

Create a new web page

To minimize the down time of the LDAV web pages, it is best practice to create the web pages for a new year offline.

Getting started

You are free to create the web page in whatever way you like, but using a previous year's web page is probably the easiest way to start. Do not worry about preserving the git history of the previous year. In fact, it is better to start with a fresh git repository to save space. The git history of previous web pages are permanent links.

Also, when creating a new web page, do not worry about including the web content from previous years. Again, this content will is archived.

A brief primer to Jekyll

Many of the LDAV web pages were created with the Jekyll web page builder tool. Here is a quick primer on how to get started with Jekyll if you have not used it before.

Jekyll uses ruby, so first you need ruby installed on your system. Ruby might already be installed on your system, but you might need a newer version in order to be able to download the necessary packages. Generally, you can use a package manager do the dirty work.

Next, if you don't have the bundle executable on your system, you need to install bundler, which is done through the gem installer part of ruby.

sudo gem install bundler

Once bundler is installed you can finally install Jekyll.

sudo gem install jekyll

Typically, the first thing you need to do when you want to build a specific repository is to make sure that you have all the packages and plugins necessary. To update jupyter on local machine, be in this repositories root directory and run:

bundle install

You probably need to run this with root permissions (i.e. sudo).

Once you have done this, you should be able to run the Jekyll server, which will build the html pages and start a simple web server.

bundle exec jekyll serve

When you run the server, Jekyll will build the web pages in the _site directory and start a lightweight web service that you can connect to with your web browser.

Make new page live

When the new page works, it can be posted to GitHub pages. To do this, first go to GitHub and create a new repository under the LDAV-Symposium organization. The repository should be named as the 4 digit year the pages are for. Push the local repository to GitHub.

Once the files are pushed to GitHub, the GitHub pages should be enabled. Go to the GitLab repo and click on the Settings tab.

In the Code and automation section of the sidebar, click Pages. The first option for the GitHub pages is the Source. The Source is probably set to None. Change it to Master Branch.

Select Enforce HTTPS if it is not checked. Once the settings page reloads, it should let you know that the web pages are posted at a site with a name like https://ldav.org/20XX, which is where the new pages will be available under the ldav.org domain.

Rotate in new page

Once the new web page is complete, it is time to rotate in the new page by changing the redirect to the new page. The redirection is done by the index.html file in the LDAV-Symposium.github.io repository. Simply change the 2 URL references (one in a meta tag and one in a link tag) to the new repository.

Once the changes are pushed to GitHub (and GitHub has some time to rebuild), https://ldav.org should be redirected to the new pages.

Update page

Throughout the year, there will be a need to continually update the main page. The web page is easily updated by changing files in the master branch and pushing them to GitHub.

GitHub also provides pull requests, which are a convenient mechanism for excepting external contributions. If a collaborator wishes to contribute a change to the LDAV web pages, have him or her fork the repository, make a local change, and start a pull request.

Contacts

Here is a list of some contacts for some administrative access to various parts of the LDAV web page maintenance. Note that as roles change, it is possible that some of these contacts can become out of date.

GitHub Projects

You can contact Kenneth Moreland or Christoph Garth for help with the LDAV-Symposium "organization" on GitHub, under which all LDAV web page respositories are hosted. They can help add members to the organization, add new projects, and modify access.

DNS Hosting

DNS hosting is managed by the University of Utah's SCI institute. Nathan Galli is the contact there for making changes to how DNS redirects ldav.org to where the pages are hosted.