CNRGlab@UWaterloo webpage

This repository contains code and sources files to generate CNRGlab's static website.

📌 See here for the current build status

Useful code snippets

Downloading this repository and installing dependencies

git clone [email protected]/ctn-waterloo/website cnrg-website
cd cnrg-website
pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Testing the website locally

python3 manage.py run

Navigate to http://localhost:5000/ to see the website.

Note: Depending on your Python distribution you may have to use pip and python instead of pip3 and python3.

Building the website locally

python3 manage.py freeze

Once this has finished, the static HTML files can be found at ctn_waterloo/build.

Manually building and deploying the website in the CI environment
Note: Under normal circumstances you don't need to do this. This requires docker to be installed. You SSH key must be authorized to push onto the webserver for this to succeed.

./build_and_deploy.sh

Editing content

CNRGlab members with access to this repository should focus on the ctn_waterloo/content/ subdirectory, where all the text on the site lives. New blog articles can be created by adding a Markdown file in the ctn_waterloo/content/blog/ directory, and so on. In general, look at the existing files in those directories to see what your file should look like, and if you have any questions, concerns, or feature requests, please create an issue or talk to me.

This repository is set up such that when you push a commit a build is initiated through Travis-CI. The build generates all the static files, and rsync's them to the webserver. This may take a few moments, but the site should always be in sync with this repository.

How to test your edits

Please try not to break this build, as it will mean that our website could be in a broken state! If you're doing something that you're not sure about, please try your change out locally first by installing the packages in requirements.txt and then running python manage.py run from the root of this repository.

Images and other files

This repository should not be used to store files or images. Doing so would cause the repository to become large, increasing the amount of time it takes to generate the website. Ideally, when content is changed it should show up almost immediately; keeping the repository small helps do that.

Where to put files

Obviously we want plenty of images and other files on the site. The best place to put them is on the same server, just not in the git repository. Currently, the files/ directory in cnrglab's home on WatArts is symlinked such that it is accessible at compneuro.uwaterloo.ca/files. Please ask someone how to get your files into that directory, and then link to them appropriately.

The other option is to put images on an image sharing site, as long as they allow directly linking to those images on external sites. For example, I can upload a screenshot to imgur and use it in my content pages like so:

![Screenshot](http://i.imgur.com/2WpbV.png) =

Under the hood

In general, you shouldn't need to read past this. The content in ctn_waterloo/content/ should be straightforward to edit and add to; if you disagree, please say something rather than read any further! However, if you're curious...

How pages work

Pages consist of two sections: metadata and content. The first blank line separates the metadata from content. In other words, if your page contains only metadata (common for publications), then it should contain no blank lines, or only one blank line at the end of the file. For pages that only contain content (none for this site), the first line of content should be prefaced by a blank line.

Metadata is a dictionary that contains information about the content. Metadata is made available to templates separate from the content. Metadata can be expressed in two ways (at the moment): YAML or BibTeX. For YAML, this means that the metadata is key-value pairs. If you want a list, then it should be accessible by some key. For example,

title: About me
links:
    - url: http://facebook.com/tbekolay
      title: Facebook
    - url: http://bekolay.org
      title: Homepage
    - url: http://compneuro.uwaterloo.ca
      title: Lab webpage

This is my about me page. Check out the links on the right.

The metadata for this page is the following Python dictionary.

{'title': 'About me',
 'links': [
     {'url': 'http://facebook.com/tbekolay',
      'title': 'Facebook'},
     {'url: 'http://bekolay.org',
      'title': 'Homepage'},
     {'url': 'http://compneuro.uwaterloo.ca',
      'title': 'Lab webpage'}]}

Metadata can also be written in BibTeX, as this format may be more familiar or easily available for scholarly publications. Note that this BibTeX metadata cannot contain blank lines, even in comments and the abstract!

As an example, the following BibTeX contains metadata about two publications.

@article{Eliasmith2012,
    author = {Eliasmith, Chris and Stewart, Terrence C and Choo, Xuan and Bekolay, Trevor and DeWolf, Travis and Tang, Yichuan and Tang, Charlie and Rasmussen, Daniel},
    doi = {10.1126/science.1225266},
    journal = {Science},
    keywords = {Behavior, Brain, Neural Networks},
    number = {6111},
    pages = {1202--5},
    pmid = {23197532},
    title = {{A large-scale model of the functioning brain}},
    volume = {338},
    year = {2012}
}
@phdthesis{Bekolay2011,
    author = {Bekolay, Trevor},
    school = {University of Waterloo},
    title = {{Learning in large-scale spiking neural networks}},
    type = {Masters Thesis},
    url = {http://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/handle/10012/6195},
    year = {2011}
}

This is the full text for one of the publications.

The metadata for this page is the following Python dictionary.

{'publications': [{
        'citekey': 'Eliasmith2012',
        'type': 'article',
        'author': 'Eliasmith, Chris and Stewart, Terrence C and Choo, Xuan and Bekolay, Trevor and DeWolf, Travis and Tang, Yichuan and Tang, Charlie and Rasmussen, Daniel',
        'doi': '10.1126/science.1225266',
        'journal': 'Science',
        'keywords': 'Behavior, Brain, Neural Networks',
        'number': '6111',
        'pages': '1202--5',
        'pmid': '23197532',
        'title': 'A large-scale model of the functioning brain',
        'volume': '338',
        'year': '2012'
    }, {
        'citekey': 'Bekolay2011',
        'at_type': 'phdthesis',
        'author': 'Bekolay, Trevor',
        'school': 'University of Waterloo',
        'title': 'Learning in large-scale spiking neural networks',
        'type': 'Masters Thesis',
        'url': 'http://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/handle/10012/6195',
        'year': '2011'}]}

Content is written in Markdown format. If you want to include the full text of paper directly on the webpage, you can put the citation information above in BibTeX, and then include the content in Markdown format. You can include math formatted the same way as in LaTeX ($...$ for inline and $$...$$ for blocks). Images are included with ![alt text](link to image). Arbitrary HTML is also allowed, as Markdown is a superset of HTML. Please see this introduction for more information.