Universe OA

This is the blog aggregator of the Open Astronomy community. For now it's only been used for SoC programmes (GSoC/SoCiS).

Structure of this repository

There are three branches: main, run and gh-pages.

• main includes only commits made by people and not automatically.
• run runs on GH actions and updates the posts and everything
• gh-pages is the built version of the page, also done automatically.

We could keep main and run in the same branch but this makes it easier to search the commits that we care about.

Blog engine

This blog aggregator is generated as a static site using Nikola.

The configuration file for the site is conf.py. Refer to Nikola's documentation for details on how to use it.

The blog aggregator

The blog aggregator is controlled by two files: gsoc.yml and gsoc_times.yml and executed by grab.py script.

• gsoc.yml keeps a list of all the gsoc editions, the gsoc participants, their rss feed and the organisation they are working for.
• gsoc_times.yml keeps a key-value record of the date from the last contribution for each participant.
• grab.py reads from the files above and updates them after a new blog entry has been found. The entry is downloaded and added as an entry in the aggregator.

The Contributors tracker

A little widget is shown in the top of the website to track the blog posts of each participant. With our SoC rules, we require one post every fortnight.

The widget is created using a Nikola plugin. Its source is under plugins/sidebar/sidebar.py. It uses the logos and dates set in organisations.yml and dates_posts.yml load through the conf.py.

The plugin looks whether there are posts in the ranges between the dates provided, and places a symbol for each of the GSoC participants.

Updates for a new SoC season:

1. Update gsoc_times.yml from run into main

   git restore --source run gsoc_times.yml
   

   This brings the latest updates to gsoc_times.yml.

2. Add properties on gsoc.yml and on gsoc_times.yml for new students. For names we are using their github handles.

   gsocYYYY:
     gh_student_a:
       rss_feed: "rss-url" # TODO (add blog with gsoc tag)
       project: 'suborg' # TODO (add project as named on ..)

   Then, once completed that file you can run this snippet to fill gsoc_times.yml

   year=$(date +"%Y")
   lastyear=$(( ${year} - 1))
   sed -n "/^gsoc${year}/,/gsoc${lastyear}/p" gsoc.yml | grep "^  [[:alpha:]].*:$" | sed 's/^[ ]*//' | sed "s/$/ ${year}-05-01 00:00:00/g" >> gsoc_times.yml
   LC_COLLATE=C sort -o  gsoc_times.yml gsoc_times.yml # So it sorts as python does, first upper case, then lower

3. Create a PR and ask students to PR to that filling it in. As in: 2018

4. squash merge that pull request into main.

5. Locally, update dates_post.yaml with the new date ranges for this season and commit it to main

6. copy the new config files into the run branch, for example with:

   git rebase --onto run <x> <z>

   where <x> is the commit before than <y> which is the one we want to copy (up to included) to run. Then push it run and all should work. And then push to main

Debug it locally

• remove all the output:

  rm -rf .doit.db.* && rm -rf cache && nikola clean && nikola forget && rm -rf __pycache__ && rm -rf output

• run the grab if needed (modifying the gsoc_times) and build.
• To debug the plugin, add doit.tools.set_trace() instead of breakpoint to get pdb working.