This guide provides you with all the information needed to update and maintain content for the c4dm website. Most of the tasks can be directly performed directly within the c4dm Github repository. The only folder that you have to focus on is src/content. In this guide we explain how to update the following content from the website:
For adding a new patent or editing existing ones, go to /src/content/research/patents/projects in the Github repository. You will find a list of .md (markdown) files, one for each patent entry. You will see that each of the files has a structure similar to the following example:
---
title: "Music Collection Navigation"
begin: "22 August 2008 "
grant: "0815362.9 (UK), 09784979.8 (Europe), 13/060090 (USA)"
---
For adding a new patent, go to the Add file > Create new file option at the upper right corner.
You can name the file as you like, but make sure it ends with .md and that the name is unique in the folder.
Now fill in the content following the same format shown above, making sure you include a title entry with the progect's name, a begin entry with the date of the project and a grant entry with the corresponding patent number. If you don't know a aprticular entry like the patent number, you can add something like "Unknown patent number" or a similar text. Make sure to add quote marks for the content.
Adding a new project works similar than for patents. To add a new project go to /src/content/projects in the Github repository. You will find a list of .md (markdown) files, one per project. The format for each project is similar to the following example:
---
title: "RUDIMENTS: Reflective Understanding of Digital Instruments as Musical Entanglements"
link: "https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=EP%2FX023478%2F1"
author: "Prof Andrew McPherson"
begin: "2022"
end: "2027"
grant: "ERC Consolidator Grant / UKRI Research Grant EP/X023478/1"
amount: "£1,723,185"
status: "active"
tags: ["academic"]
image: "./rudiments.jpeg"
---
For adding a new project, similar to patents, create a new file and fill in the content following the same format shown above. In the author entry, add the PI for the project and any other involved investigators, if applies.
For the status entry, add "active" if ther project is still in development, and add "complete" is the project has closed. This will help to organize projects when navigating.
Feel free to add tags for your project, they must be added as an array, each element in quotes, and separated by a comma (e.g. tags: ["academic","AI","musical-instrument"]).
If you want to add an image to be displayed along the project, please upload the image to the same folder where the .md file is. Then, in the image entry, add the file name following the format above. \
Important: If no image is available, use the default image by adding "./placeholder.png"for the image entry.
Publications are structured as .bib files. If you go to /src/content/publications in the Github repository, you will see one .bib file per year. For adding new entries, you can either modify an existing year file or adding a new year if needed. \
Important: Make sure that the .bib file is "clean" enough, meaning that:
- It doesn't contain empty categories, such as
conference = {} - Each entry should contain a non-empty year (e.g.
year = {2019}) - Remove duplicate entries. This is very likely to occur if you import .bib from QM Elements.
For adding a new file, go to go to /src/content/publications and press Add file > Upload file in the upper right corner of the repository and upload the corresponding .bib file.
For adding a new member of c4dm (to be displayed in the People page), go to /src/content/people in the Github repository. You will find a list of .md (markdown) files, one for each member. Each file has a structure similar to the following example:
---
name: "Teodoro Dannemann"
url: "https://teodannemann.wordpress.com/"
acadposition: "PhD Student"
blurb: "Sabotaging, errors and other mistakes as a source of new techniques in music improvisation"
themes: ["augmi","isam"]
role: "PhD"
image: "./teodannemann.png"
elements_id: 00000
---
The acadposition should be a very short (2-3 words) description of the position of the member. /
The themes entry corresponds to the lab(s) that the member is taking part. Current labels for labs are:
- Intelligent Sound Engineering --> "audioeng"
- Augmented Instruments --> "augmi"
- Communication Acoustics --> "comma"
- Machine Listening --> "mlist"
- Music Cognition --> "mcog"
- Music Informatics --> "mir"
- Sonic Interaction Design --> "isam"
- Sound Synthesis --> "soundsynthesis"
The role entry is used to group people of the same academic position (e.g PhDs, academics, etc). Make sure that you use the exact same label so members can be correctly grouped. You can see the current tags by going to the people page and checking the tags that appear. If you add a new label to a member, you should see the corresponding tag appearing on this page.
The elements_id is used to automatically retrieve publications from Elements. Find this 5-digit number by going to Elements, then clicking on "My profile" in the user menu at the top right. Your Elements user id will then be visible as a url parameter, the part ?uid=38282 appended to https://elements.qmul.ac.uk/userprofile.html in your browser's address bar. If you are looking for someone else's user id, scroll down the page until you see "Find a colleague" in the right column. Searching for that person's name takes you to their profile, where you can find their id by following the same procedure.
If you want to add an image of the member to be displayed, please upload the image to the same folder where the .md file is. Then, in the image entry, add the file name following the format above. \
Important: If no image is available, use the default image by adding "./defaultprofile.png"for the image entry.
For adding news and events entries, go to /src/content/news in the Github repository. You will find a list of .md (markdown) files, one for each news & events entry. To create a new entry, create a new .md file, as explain in patents section. The file should start with the following format:
---
title: " C4DM Seminar: Axel Marmoret"
author: "Admin"
date: 2022-03-16
image: "./placeholder.png"
tags: ["seminars", "events"]
---
title and author don't have any restrictions in format.
date has to follow the yyyy-mm-dd format and cannot be quoted.
tags is an array of words to group the news & events when displayed. You can add whatever tag you find useful. Just remember to be consistent and not create too many tags as it could lead to a cumbersome page display.
If you want to add an image to be displayed for the particular entry, please upload the image to the same folder where the .md file is. Then, in the image entry, add the file name following the format above. \
Important: If no image is available, use the default image by adding "./placeholder.png"for the image entry.
A quick technical perspective on how the website was created and how it is hosted.
The website was created with the Gatsby framework. Gatsby is a react-based static site generator. It further uses the CSS framework Bulma for styling.
The source code is hosted and built here on GitHub. Every time, changes are committed to GitHub a rebuilt is triggered on Github Pages.
Typically, you can run an updating server with the gatsby develop command
However, there are some plugins (such as Create Redirects), which only run upon building. If you want to preview changes of these (its much slower), you can do the following:
build the site with gatsby build
navigate to the built site with cd public
run a local server using http-server -g
then navigate to the url provided by the CLI