Front-page frequently updating content

[amandavisconti]

Consider areas on the front page for:

1. Latest blog post links
2. Latest community collaboration news
3. Latest and upcoming Spatial Tech fieldwork site info
4. Photos from Lab work (e.g. via Will's Twitter)
5. Quick news (shorter than blog post) e.g. mentions in the news, grant activity

[amandavisconti]

Not something I'll work on until any other site priority work is done and published, but documenting as I was thinking about it (and I don't have much I can help with on the site until theming is nearly done, I think?).

My current thinking is we want to be able to isolate posts in three main areas:

• blog (essays/true blog posts, not announcements)
• announcements (events, workshop series, fellowships, CFPs)
• updates (300-character limit, so can also Bluesky-tweet; updates on things SLab folks are doing that don't need longer text, e.g. x person is providing y work for a z research sprint, x person just published an article at this link, we enjoyed having x visitors in the lab today to learn about y aspect of the lab's work)

A previous closed issue had an idea for doing quick updates as data files. I'm no longer keen on that.

Two options:

1. All are posts; use a new YAML field to indicate which 1 of the 3 possible types a post is, and use that to pull into various places on the site. Most straightforward. Easy to create one feed of all content (blog, announcements, updates) should we want that ever (unsure if we do?).
2. Blog and announcements are posts; use same method as #1 to be able to pull these into site both separately and together. Updates are a Gsheet we export as CSV into /_data. Benefit is I'm the one planning to do this the most, and this makes it easier to tie these into Bluesky tweeting the same text. Creating a new post per small thing is onerous, and means another folder full of files that might end up having badly-matching filename patterns. Data file is hard to organize (would want to put newest things at very top so don't have to eventually scroll way down), hard to do a periodic action I'd want to do (skim a hidden column for whose work I've mentioned, so I can make sure I'm communicating everyone's work and not just some people's).

I'm leaning toward trying # 2. We can always switch to posts if this isn't working well. It's something I know how to implement already (have done for another project). I don't think we want an "all content" list (blog posts, announcements, with updates mixed in). If we did, there might be a way to code this despite the CSV (would need to use liquid templating variable to pull in both posts and CSV data, sort by date).

Tasks:

• Add YAML field to existing posts (blog vs announcements). Or easier: if no YAML field, assume blog post. That way I just need to add to announcement posts.

[amandavisconti]

I have started labeling announcement posts locally, because I'm a nerd. Noting so no one duplicates that effort.

[amandavisconti]

Notes:

• Deleting "digital humanities" in categories and tags when I see it. We argue most of our work is DH, and it is not used regularly enough across posts to be useful
• Also deleting "Announcements" category, as its use doesn't match upcoming use (but it helps me find posts that are mostly, but not all, needing the new type tag; I go through these manually so we don't mislabel)
• "Announcement" does not mean anything you think of as being announced!

"Type: Announcement" is for: job ads, fellow/worker ads, welcome new hire posts, welcome incoming fellows posts, podcast posts (ones with just a link and a title, no essay), events and workshop announcement posts

Don't use "announcement" on: announcement of code or project launches, detailed discussion of grants we got that are going to support events (e.g. Speaking in Code posts), anything that is tangentially related to an announcement item BUT has 2+ paragraphs of unique essay writing (not "here is the pasted blurb for this event or launched book")

I know some pre-2018 redirects use categories in the URLs, but given each post can have multiple categories and we may not carry over those redirects to the latest site, I'm fine with cleaning up our YAML (more user friendly, which is a real goal; want to use tags/categories that we need, and have them applied everywhere they should be; hard to do with lots of YAML cruft) and breaking those old links should they be saved somewhere.

[amandavisconti]

Schema

Type

type:
Announcement
Blog
Update

1. blog = essays/true blog posts; includes announcement of code or project launches, detailed discussion of grants we got that are going to support events (e.g. Speaking in Code posts), anything that is tangentially related to an announcement item BUT has 2+ paragraphs of unique essay writing (not "here is the pasted blurb for this event or launched book")
2. announcements = events, workshop series, fellowships, CFPs, job ads, fellow/worker ads, welcome new hire posts, welcome incoming fellows posts, old podcast posts that are basically just a link and a title
3. updates = 300-character limit, so can also Bluesky-tweet; updates on things SLab folks are doing that don't need longer text, e.g. x person is providing y work for a z research sprint, x person just published an article at this link, we enjoyed having x visitors in the lab today to learn about y aspect of the lab's work

No "type" entered should be treated as "type: blog" (when writing liquid templating loops)

Categories

New categories: `Categories:

• Podcasts
• Grad Student Research
• Geospatial and Temporal (could consider spatial technologies, with tags for sub-areas like gis, 3d data, scanning, vr?)
• Research and Development (could consider changing to "DH research design and code" but that's long)
• Makerspace

  tk

  ` Old categories I got rid of:

• ~Digital Humanities~
• ~Announcements~
• ~Job Announcements~
• ~Pedagogy~ (want to pull via category loop, but couldn't bc of multiple categories on some posts; switched all such posts so they are tagged pedagogy instead of category'd pedagogy) A few might still linger in there on some posts somewhere, but got most of them.

Need to figure out if keeping: experimental-humanities technical-training uncategorized visualization-and-data-mining

Keep all project-specific categories (e.g. neatline, prism) as allow pulling into /work pages

Tags

New tags: `Tags:

• pedagogy (lower case p currently required)
• praxis program (need to look into whether we want hyphens or no)
• staffing (student and staff job ads; new hire announcements)
• alt-ac (e.g.past Katina work in this area; requires hyphen)
• zines
• games
• professional development
• 3DCHI
• cbw
• VR
• tutorial
• care
• charter
• graduate training (only for things NOT tagged praxis program)
• gis
• mincomp
• about-collaboration (post discusses collaboration itself, not just happens to be about a project that was a collaboration)

  tk

  ` Removing:

• ~Digital Humanities~
• Anything redundant with category (e.g. makerspace category applied, doesn't need a tag saying same thing) (just listing ones I see repeatedly for now, will script to get all as are too many)

  tk

Future searches to do:

• tutorial
• workshop
• speaker series
• events

Keep all project-specific tags (e.g. neatline, prism) as allow pulling into /work pages

[amandavisconti]

Jekyll docs: "The hallmark difference between categories and tags is that categories of a post may be incorporated into the generated URL for the post, while tags cannot be."

If we aren't going to recreate very-dated redirects from what the links were 2017 and earlier, we should consider removing either tags or categories and just using 1 of the 2? Waiting until see how deploy site, not a good thing to spend time on now.

[amandavisconti]

Need to make tag loops case-insensitive (right now, for post in site.tags.pedagogy only calls lower-cased p pedagogy taggings)

Need to check handling space tags like "praxis program" (see link)

[amandavisconti]

~check mixes in looking fine on /blog (e.g. no link to other pages, how styled: "Update" as header title, post.content instead of excerpt) then can close this issue~ yep, fixed and tested this (required adding a new update.html /_layout)

[amandavisconti]

Moving the tags and categories work to its own issue #1021

[amandavisconti]

Updates creation work complete.